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1992-12-16 - Re: ps -laxww for randmoness?

Header Data

From: tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts’o)
To: avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au
Message Hash: 38c0626dcfc333ea5f2fa8b8c472ad2ea898a8c48ece4588796083684ef3886e
Message ID: <9212160715.AA09133@tsx-11.MIT.EDU>
Reply To: <9212151530.AA05832@coombs.anu.edu.au>
UTC Datetime: 1992-12-16 07:15:59 UTC
Raw Date: Tue, 15 Dec 92 23:15:59 PST

Raw message

From: tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Theodore Ts'o)
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 92 23:15:59 PST
To: avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au
Subject: Re: ps -laxww for randmoness?
In-Reply-To: <9212151530.AA05832@coombs.anu.edu.au>
Message-ID: <9212160715.AA09133@tsx-11.MIT.EDU>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


   From: avalon@coombs.anu.edu.au (Darren Reed)
   Date: Wed, 16 Dec 92 2:30:49 EST

   Has anyone tried using the microsecond counter from unix as a random
   source ?  Its obviously *not* going to be good if you want a continuous
   stream of random numbers, but if you need them just 'every now and then',
   what about it ?

This should be in an FAQ:  Unixes have different levels of granularity
in the microsecond counter; some systems may only have a 10 ms (that's
10000 microsecond) resolution to their clock.  So you can't necessarily
depend on a getting lot of bits of randomness from this method.

						- Ted

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