On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 11:45:57AM -0500, Wietse Venema wrote:
> Victor Duchovni:
> > On Tue, Dec 29, 2009 at 11:34:39AM -0500, Wietse Venema wrote:
> >
> > > What other /dev/*random devices do you have? As long as you use a
> > > device that does not block, Postfix will be fine.
> >
> > With 10.5 there's just:
> >
> > crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 8, 0 Dec 29 11:37 /dev/random
> > crw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 8, 1 Oct 30 01:09 /dev/urandom
> >
> > with the former a blocking device presumably... I'll check out 10.6
> > later today or tomorrow.
>
> Postfix sets a time limit of 10s on "random device" reads. If
> /dev/random is less buggy then that could be a workaround.
On Linux, I am not a big fan of "/dev/random". In addition to the
unnecessary latency, its security properties are more questionable than
those of a decent PRNG with intermittent seeding via external events.
The BSD manpage for random/urandom on MacOSX claims the two are identical
(though the device minor number is different), with both running Yarrow.
So /dev/random is probably fine, but it may also fail to implement poll(),
unless some bozo specifically made /dev/urandom different, by noting
its alleged non-blocking semantics, and made it non-pollable...
--
Viktor.
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