Re: Neon and /dev/random

Dale, you've already received on-topic replies. I'm writing to make a
meta-comment:

Please don't follow up to an existing thread to start a new subject.
See http://subversion.tigris.org/mailing-list-guidelines.html#fresh-post
for a detailed explanation of why.

Thanks,
-Karl

"Dale Worley" <dworley@pingtel.com> writes:
> My apologies if this has been discussed before, but it seems to me that for
> Subversion's use, Neon should be built to use /dev/urandom by default.
> /dev/random is necessary if one wants cryptographic-quality random bits, but
> as far as I know, Subversion's security does not depend on the
> unpredictability of transaction IDs.
>
> On the other hand, a peculiarity of /dev/random is that it extracts its
> random information from hardware input events on the computer, but it does
> not include disk accesses and network packets, because they are not due to
> external physical systems, and might be manipulatable by other
> processes/systems on the network. On a workstation, /dev/random gets all
> the information it needs from the keyboard and mouse, but Neon runs on a
> server, which does not get keyboard and mouse events.
>
> The result is that it's hardly surprising that accessing /dev/random blocks
> on some people's servers, and there's no reason not to use /dev/urandom.
>
> Dale
>
>
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