[TriLUG] need help, netcat as a traffic generator?

[Brian Henning]

I was about to reply along this line earlier today, before I googled
"urandom"...  Assuming it works similarly on all *nix systems (which, I
realize, could be a big assumption), both urandom and random pull from the
entropy pool; the only difference being that random blocks when it runs out,
whereas urandom forges ahead with a pseudo-random generator.  At least,
that's how I interpreted what I read.

~B


> -----Original Message-----
> From: trilug-bounces at trilug.org [mailto:trilug-bounces at trilug.org]On
> Behalf Of Michael Tharp
> Sent: Thursday, August 24, 2006 7:54 PM
> To: Triangle Linux Users Group discussion list
> Subject: Re: [TriLUG] need help, netcat as a traffic generator?
>
>
> Aaron S. Joyner wrote:
> > Just to throw in another data point, you could also use /dev/zero, which
> > will give you an endless stream of zeros.  If you don't care about what
> > the data is (ie. don't need it to be at least moderately random), using
> > /dev/zero won't needlessly deplete your systems source of random).
> >
> > Aaron S. Joyner
> >
> Does urandom even use entropy? I thought it was an independent
> pseudo-random generator, unlike /dev/random which will block until it
> gets enough entropy.
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