[Dovecot] random pool depletion

Johannes Berg johannes at sipsolutions.net
Thu Dec 30 14:54:40 EET 2004


I'm facing a problem with dovecot 1.0 test-59; ever since I installed it 
and use it my random pool is always depleted whenever someone opens an 
imap connection. This wouldn't be too bad if the machine was used 
interactively, but since it is not and other services read directly from 
/dev/random those are sometimes blocked due to dovecot depleting the 
pool by reading /dev/urandom.

Thus my question: is it really necessary to use random numbers from 
/dev/urandom for temporary filenames? And even if, couldn't it use less? 
It apparently uses 8 bytes every time.

johannes



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