Generate Entropy for GnuPG

You made my day! Thanks kindly for the great tip

Thanks for the tip! I got my key finished almost instantly too!

It worked superbly !! Thanks again

Fantastic :)
Simple and effective. Thanks!

Doesn't work -.-
Before(Need 284 more bytes)
After (Need 280 more bytes)

Thanks for the method. After researching the problem there are a few solutions it seems. I found this one earlier http://www.wiktip.org/entropy-gpg-key/ and that worked for me.

Likely your filesystem is too small to generate enough entropy out of reading only the directory contents and metadata (which is all ls -R / will do) and you kernel may have most of the contents already cached. When I need to generate entropy on a remote VM guest, I typically will do something like:

find /var/ /usr /lib /srv -type f -print0 | xargs -0 cat > /dev/null

as the actual data contents of the filesystem will typically be larger than what the system is able to cache in memory, thus generating enough disk activity and entropy for whatever it is that I'm trying to accomplish.

We had the same issue of the filesystem being too small alsp..

Running md5sum /dev/sda & in the background a few times worked a charm!

- Jamie