Thanks for writing this article, I really liked it. I've similarly had frustrations with /dev/random. I could probably live with /dev/random and /dev/urandom a

Thanks for writing this article, I really liked it. I've similarly had frustrations with /dev/random. I could probably live with /dev/random and /dev/urandom as they are, except that /dev/urandom also depletes the entropy counter. So if something (in my case nmbd from samba) is always reading from /dev/urandom for some reason, there's never anything for anyone to read from /dev/random on those rare occasions when it's "needed". So on that system I use the hack of using udev rules making /dev/random just another name for urandom ( http://www.ploxiln.net/wiki/linux_urandom_for_random http://www.ploxiln.net/wiki/linux_urandom_for_random ). But with the boot-time no-entropy-at-all problem, I find myself wishing /dev/random on linux worked like you describe freebsd works. In fact, I might replace my udev rules with a startup script that waits to read 128 bytes from /dev/random, then switches it to actually be urandom :)