script failure & random seed file

[David Shaw]

On Tue, May 18, 2004 at 02:57:02PM -0500, seidls at schneider.com wrote:
> Our processes to encrypt data failed last night, and GPG returned the
> following information:
> gpg: WARNING: using insecure memory!
> gpg: please see http://www.gnupg.org/faq.html for more information
> gpg: note: random_seed file is empty
> gpg: fatal: can't connect to `/var/spool/prngd/pool': Connection refused
> 
> Can someone explain why we would have received these messages?  I verified
> the random_seed file was not empty, and I do not know what
> /var/spool/prngd/pool is.

It looks like you are using the program prngd to generate randomness,
but prngd isn't running.  GnuPG needs a source of entropy, whether it
is native to the OS, prngd, egd, or otherwise.  It won't run with no
entropy source at all.

David