Miscellaneous Notes

Summary

This page is a collection of random documentation that I haven’t found a better place for.

Entropy

Definition: (noun) A measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.

Entropy is important for computers for a variety reasons. Most commonly it is used for Security related tasks like creating GPG or SSH keys.

For these tasks the higher the entropy on you computer the more secure your keys will be. According to Red Hat, on a Linux system, you want a level of at least 3000 for GPG.

To check your current level you can run:

cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail

Example output:

If your entropy is not high enough, you can setup rngd (Random Number Generator Daemon) from the rng-tools package to automatically generate entropy in the background.