teatotal: Thread: Tea-kgen fails on FreeBSD

Hi,
I've just installed the Tea-Total port on a new install of FreeBSD 4.10.

When I try to run tea-kgen I get the following error:

machine# tea-kgen
If tea-kgen pauses, mash keyboard or move mouse to generate more randomness.
Failed to read enough data from random device
machine#

There is no pause to enable me to hit the keyboard, but anyway I'd expect it
to be getting the random data from /dev/random

Does anyone have any idea on how I can fix / work around this?

Yours,
Mark

Mark wrote:
> If tea-kgen pauses, mash keyboard or move mouse to generate more randomness.

That means that it successfully opened /dev/random but when it tried to 
read 16 bytes from it, the read() call returned zero bytes, as if it was 
an empty file. I don't know enough about FreeBSD to guess why it would 
be doing that. You could try using Tea Total's own random number 
generator instead of the one built into the OS. Just edit Makefile and 
comment out the RANDOM_DEVICE line inside the ifeq($ARCH), FREEBSD) 
block, then rebuild everything.

BTW Tea Total hasn't been under active development for quite a while 
now, and I wouldn't recommend using the CVS snapshot because I stopped 
in the middle of some quite extensive changes.

-- 
------------ Alex Holden - http://www.alexholden.net/ ------------
If it doesn't work, you're not hitting it with a big enough hammer

FWIW, changing the Makefile.patch to point to /dev/urandom rather than
/dev/random works for me.  I don't know enough about FreeBSD to suggest why
that would be.

Again, thanks for your help.

Yours,
Mark 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alex Holden ####@####.#### 
> Sent: 01 January 2005 17:11
> To: ####@####.####
> Cc: ####@####.####
> Subject: Re: Tea-kgen fails on FreeBSD
> 
> Mark wrote:
> > If tea-kgen pauses, mash keyboard or move mouse to generate 
> more randomness.
> 
> That means that it successfully opened /dev/random but when 
> it tried to read 16 bytes from it, the read() call returned 
> zero bytes, as if it was an empty file. I don't know enough 
> about FreeBSD to guess why it would be doing that. You could 
> try using Tea Total's own random number generator instead of 
> the one built into the OS. Just edit Makefile and comment out 
> the RANDOM_DEVICE line inside the ifeq($ARCH), FREEBSD) 
> block, then rebuild everything.
> 
> BTW Tea Total hasn't been under active development for quite 
> a while now, and I wouldn't recommend using the CVS snapshot 
> because I stopped in the middle of some quite extensive changes.
> 
> --
> ------------ Alex Holden - http://www.alexholden.net/ 
> ------------ If it doesn't work, you're not hitting it with a 
> big enough hammer
> 

On Sat, Jan 01, 2005 at 08:42:52PM -0000, Mark wrote:
> FWIW, changing the Makefile.patch to point to /dev/urandom rather than
> /dev/random works for me.  I don't know enough about FreeBSD to suggest why
> that would be.

Afaik /dev/urandom always returns as many bytes as asked for, even if it
is forced into producing a pseudorandom sequence,
differing from /dev/random which does not return more bytes than are
guaranteed to be "really random".

Cheers,
--
Ivan