I can see your concern. Adding a hardware entropy device to the system may be a reliable option. If the servers have audio cards, that could work. If not, there are several available on the market. Heck, with a little help from my profs at school (I'm currently studying Electrincal Engineering) I could build one for you.



I think he's correct. From what I can tell, the default sources of entropy (disk, mouse and keyboard activity) aren't nearly enough. Especially since disk activity is more expensive on a UML machine than a real host. I don't want to bog the whole host down by trying to read/write files with a daemon just to generate entropy.

As for network activity generating entropy, I don't think it's turned on in the kernel I'm using. I'll try booting into the latest kernel and see if it works there. That alone will probably solve this since I don't have much disk activity, but there are a couple of small files hosted on my machine which are included in friend'd signatures on very busy forums. These would generate a lot of network interrupts without a lot of traffic.

-- James