GPG Error "Not enough random bytes. Do one more job to give the OS the ability to collect more",

Question

I use:

gpg --gen-key 

Is there a better way to create a PGP key? What does this program want? Completely locked server?

Not enough random bytes. Please do one more job to enable the OS to collect more

Answer 1

You can move the mouse, browse the Internet, play a game, leave your computer at night. There are many ways to generate random bytes. You do not need to keep an eye on the gpg process.

EDIT: I have to clarify: you don’t need to pay attention or even type into the terminal where gpg works. (And it’s really a bad idea to dial this terminal anyway.)

If you are on a remote server and cannot otherwise generate work, you can try the following: http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/stress . Use caution .

Answer 2

Depending on your system hardware, you can achieve more reliable success by using a bridge between the hardware TRNG (random number generator) and the kernel entropy pool.

I found a remarkable speed increase with rng-tools in the universe repository, which can be installed using Synaptic or another GUI package manager or via the command line:

 sudo apt-get install rng-tools 

Answer 3

Running the following command in the background works for me:

 sudo find / -type f | xargs grep somerandomstring > /dev/null 

Answer 4

I found that only moving the program to the background worked even on the ssh interface:

• move the task to the background ( Ctrl + z )
• complete a few short tasks ( cd ~ && ./my-time-waster.sh )
• move the task to the front ( fg )
• Wait a minute or two.

I am using CentOS5 and CentOS6.

Answer 5

Try using rngd , but without -r /dev/random you will often see people advise (which will lead to insecure GPG keys). On my machine, just installing rngd installs a daemon that quickly and reliably fills my entropy.

Answer 6

If you are in a VM , you should use EGD since random bytes on the VM are not really random and so safe