[Dovecot] random pool depletion

[Timo Sirainen]

On Thu, 2004-12-30 at 13:54 +0100, Johannes Berg wrote:
> I'm facing a problem with dovecot 1.0 test-59; ever since I installed it 
> and use it my random pool is always depleted whenever someone opens an 
> imap connection. This wouldn't be too bad if the machine was used 
> interactively, but since it is not and other services read directly from 
> /dev/random those are sometimes blocked due to dovecot depleting the 
> pool by reading /dev/urandom.

I thought /dev/urandom didn't affect /dev/random? Guess I was wrong. Or
is this Linux?

> Thus my question: is it really necessary to use random numbers from 
> /dev/urandom for temporary filenames? And even if, couldn't it use less? 
> It apparently uses 8 bytes every time.

I guess I could add random_weak_fill() function which they use, which
would basically call just rand().

Other things that use randomness are non-plaintext authentication
mechanisms, maybe most importantly APOP, which if enabled reads 16 bytes
for every POP3 login even if it's not using APOP.

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