/dev/urandom

[Ben Taylor]

On Thu, 13 Jan 2000, Max Shaposhnikov wrote:

> on solaris7/sparc this device doesn't exists
> 
> i can use EGD but he very big (perl script!) - in memory it take about
> 4mb! apache use the same!

Yeah, it is a bit piggy.  On my Usparc running 2.6, memory utilization
is about 2.8M, but another 1.4M is paged/swapped out.

> why ssh1.27 doesn't requre /dev/urandom on solaris?

I don't know.  I have no experience with the ssh1.27. I think I used
like 1.20 or 1.22 several years ago, but I wasn't doing any
development.

> what alternatives exists?

None, that I'm aware of.  I don't do a whole lot with crypto
since I'm in the USA. (Legal stuff, and all that, besides
I'm *not* a mathematician...) :-)

I suppose that someone could port the /dev/urandom stuff to
Solaris.  It would definitely be less memory intensive, I 
suspect.

Regards,

Ben