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Date: Wed, 14 Apr 2004 00:31:31 -0400 (EDT)
From: Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.ORG>
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To: Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
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cc: Mark Murray <markm@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject: Re: dev/random
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On Tue, 13 Apr 2004, Chuck Swiger wrote:

> > Consider a PC in a University's PC access hall/lab. Would you (paranoid
> > as you are!) trust _anything_ on that machine's hard disk?
> 
> I'm not paranoid...they really are out to get me.  :-) [1]
> 
> Anyway, in the circumstances pertaining to this thread, aren't we
> talking about diskless clients in a university lab, and an
> access-controlled fileserver locked away in a rack somewhere which has
> the disks? 

I have to say that if you're loading your kernel out of TFTP, and your
root file system is running out of NFS, the chances are you won't mind
loading /entropy out of NFS.

Sounds like a tunable is called for that can be turned on in that
environment, and possible a console warning if the system is stalled >1
second during boot waiting on entropy...

Robert N M Watson             FreeBSD Core Team, TrustedBSD Projects
robert@fledge.watson.org      Senior Research Scientist, McAfee Research