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in gpg --key-gen

following error occured.

Not enough random bytes available. 
Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more 
entropy!
(Need 300 more bytes)

What's wrong?

freddiefujiwra
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2 Answers2

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/dev/random's entropy pool is depleted.

"do something" to generate disk activity, network traffic, etc... and the entropy will build.

"man random" for more info.

"cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail" to see how you're doing, then try the gpg process again.

jeff
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  • As an example of what to do I started with 257 in entropy_avail I then did touch blah rm blah about 10 times now I have entropy_avail, so most any disk access should do. – Unkwntech Aug 06 '09 at 03:06
  • In case someone else encounters it: starting programs (ASLR? No idea) seems to consume some entropy (about 100). To watch the entropy pool, write a C program that reads the contents of the file and periodically writes it back (don't forget to `lseek(fd, 0, SEEK_SET)`. – Lekensteyn Jan 28 '13 at 23:16
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The Linux kernel maintains a "pool" of random bytes that may be accessed via ioctl calls or via the special /dev/random and /dev/urandom files.

The timing of interrupts handled by the kernel is one of a several sources of randomness that feeds into the pool. Examples are the timing of keyboard and mouse input, the timing of hard drive read/write activity, and the timing of interrupts raised to handle incoming network packets.

All of these sources can be more active when a user is actively interacting with the system. Thus the encouragement to do more "work" in order to trickle more random bytes into the pool for gpg to consume.

IvanGoneKrazy
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