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Mention IRC channel. Fix typo. (Note to self: use a command-line spell
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checker next time.)
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mikemol committed Apr 16, 2012
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Expand Up @@ -27,7 +27,7 @@ Entropy is a quantity or measure of randomness. You could think of it as some se

To some extent, sure. Different Pseudo-Random Number Generators (PRNGs). For some use cases, certainly; some scientific uses like the reproducable nature of PRNGs. For other cases, such as cryptography, a reproduceable random-number generator is harmful.

Yes, there is hardware for generating random numbers. It's typically either expensive, inconvenient, uncommon or some combination of the three. In the expensive category are expansion cards which can cost a couple thousand dollard. In the inconvenient category sits things like USB HRNGs; it's rather difficult to plug a USB device into a rented virtual machine in a data center a few thousand miles away. In the uncommon category are things like specialized CPU instructions; Intel's Bull Mountain RDRAND instruction is part of the not-yet-available Ivy Bridge core, and it's extraordinarily doubtful that that CPU instruction will be available to the majority of virtual machines within a decade.
Yes, there is hardware for generating random numbers. It's typically either expensive, inconvenient, uncommon or some combination of the three. In the expensive category are expansion cards which can cost a couple thousand dollars. In the inconvenient category sits things like USB HRNGs; it's rather difficult to plug a USB device into a rented virtual machine in a data center a few thousand miles away. In the uncommon category are things like specialized CPU instructions; Intel's Bull Mountain RDRAND instruction is part of the not-yet-available Ivy Bridge core, and it's extraordinarily doubtful that that CPU instruction will be available to the majority of virtual machines within a decade.

*** 1.3. Entropy pool?

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -69,6 +69,8 @@ The entmesh set of programs hasn't been written yet. It's intended to be a modul

If I'm wrong, I'd be happy to hear it. Drop me (Mike Mol) a line; my email address is in the AUTHORS file. I'll be happy to discuss or correct any errors. (Or send me a pull request with bugfixes; I'm interested in those, too.)

etools also has an IRC channel: #etools on Freenode. See http://freenode.net/using_the_network.shtml for details.

** 2. List of programs

entbuff - Behaves as an entropy capacitor. When the kernel entropy pool is above one threshold, entropy is pulled from the kernel and stored in an internal buffer. When the kernel entropy pool falls below another threshold, entropy is taken from the internal buffer and written back to the pool.
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