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OpenBSD talks about /dev/srandom, which produces a cryptographically strong source of bits, but it just blocks on my machine. I wonder if I have to fiddle with a kernel setting to make it work.

update: turns out that on OpenBSD, you cannot just open R, '/dev/srandom' and hope that it works. Apparently (and this strikes me as incredibly klugey, but maybe it's more bulletproof), you have to do something like:

  dd if=/dev/srandom of=./bits bs=4096 count=1
[download]

and after a suitably impressive wait you will have some strong random bits waiting for you in ./bits.

Otherwise an alternative is to grab some bits from a random seed. Maybe for v2.0. I think Linux has /dev/random which blocks if the entropy pool is exhausted, which would be the way to go on that platform. Trouble is that OpenBSD doesn't implement that device, it is RFU.

update: It looks like the lava lamp is dead.

`g r i n d e r`

In reply to Re:x2 spew - print out random characters by grinder
in thread spew - print out random characters by grinder

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