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Date:      Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:07:34 -0700
From:      Chuck Swiger <cswiger@mac.com>
To:        RW <rwmaillists@googlemail.com>
Cc:        ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: apr ports devrandom option
Message-ID:  <732B2687-76E1-4693-8658-1C3C9B142542@mac.com>
In-Reply-To: <20100617000106.2db70cb4@gumby.homeunix.com>
References:  <20100617000106.2db70cb4@gumby.homeunix.com>

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On Jun 16, 2010, at 4:01 PM, RW wrote:
> The devel/apr* ports have an option to use /dev/random, which is on by
> default. 
> 
> I was wondering under what circumstances anyone would turn that off. As
> far as I can see switching it off doesn't replace /dev/random with
> anything else.

On some platforms, /dev/random and /dev/urandom used to provide different quality of random numbers-- FreeBSD simply uses Yarrow or a hardware RNG source if available.  Even if you disable it, it's likely to just fall back to OpenSSL's source of random numbers, which probably is /dev/random anyway....

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck




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