rsync - Jan 2005 - PRNG is not seeded

This is likely a linux or ssh problem, but perhaps someone else on this
list may have encountered it.  I have run about 15,000 instances of
rsync in the last year, (about 500 total hours of rsyncing) using ssh
as a transport mechanism  ( actually, I am running the dirvish backup
wrapper, www.dirvish.org, around rsync).  In all cases, I am pulling
filesystems from a linux client to a linux backup server.  Rsync has
worked flawlessly every time.  Except  ...

Sometimes in my logs I see, at random, the warning "PRNG is not
seeded",
which some folks encounter when they improperly configure ssh or
/dev/urandom.  This appears to emit from ssh to stderr; there is
nothing in any of the files in /var/log, or in the -vv log from rsync.
This has happened 6 times in the 12 months, twice in the last week. 
Pretty rare.

Rsync is still doing its job, and completes the task on time and without
apparent data corruption.  However, I am predisposed to fret about small
things, and wonder if the message indicates something needing attention.

I am willing to add more debugging flags or recompile code to track
this down, but an hour's worth of rsyncing a night is not a good
candidate for verbose tools like strace.  So I'm wondering if others
have seen this, or if anyone has a well-thought-out solution for
locating the precise cause of the "PRNG is not seeded" message.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl@keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in
Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs

On Sun, Jan 23, 2005 at 06:35:13AM -0800, Keith Lofstrom
wrote:
> Sometimes in my logs I see, at random, the warning "PRNG is not
seeded",
> which some folks encounter when they improperly configure ssh or
> /dev/urandom.
"PRNG" is the Pseudo Random Number Generator, and you are right that
it
is unlikely to be rsync (I can't think of anything in rsync that uses
random numbers).  I'd suggest googling for your quoted phrase -- there
seems to be a good bit of discussion about it and ways to add entropy to
your random number generator so that ssh will stop complaining.

..wayne..