Re: Why does reading from /dev/urandom deplete entropy so much?

[Jeff Garzik <jeff@garzik.org>]

Theodore Tso wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 08, 2007 at 11:33:57AM -0600, Mike McGrath wrote:
> > > Huh?  What's the concern?  All you are submitting is a list of
> > > hardware devices in your system.  That's hardly anything sensitive....
> > We actually had a very vocal minority about all of that which ended up 
> > putting us in the unfortunate position of generating a random UUID instead 
> > of using a hardware UUID from hal :-/
>
> Tinfoil hat responses indeed!  Ok, if those folks are really that
> crazy, my suggestion then would be to do a "ifconfig -a > /dev/random"

heh, along those lines you could also do

	dmesg > /dev/random

<grin>

dmesg often has machine-unique identifiers of all sorts (including the 
MAC address, if you have an ethernet driver loaded)

	Jeff



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