Re: [bitfolk] Entropy and virtual machines

Hello, On Mon, Jun 07, 2010 at 08:18:09PM +0300, Ander Punnar wrote: I reckon that under 200 bytes for anything more than a few seconds is not great. But to put this in perspective, all that happens is that things block when they need entropy that isn't there. Nothing should really break, except in extreme circumstances. Anecdotally I have heard that gnutls (which is replacing OpenSSL in many packages, particularly in Debian) is a lot hungrier for entropy than OpenSSL. People have reported to me (for example) that their mail servers are sometimes unable to open a TLS connection, or their gnupg is unable to generate a key. Not really, except where the load is requiring entropy. Creating a process requires 32-64 bytes of entropy, generating a session key will require some, setting up an SSL connection will require more, etc. etc. A lot of loads do things that *generate* entropy, so we can see in the second part of my posting that left to itself, urquell actually has less entropy than the other hosts merely because it's idle. If your work load is generating a lot of hardware interrupts then the host should get more entropy. Cheers, Andy -- http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting