Thingy Ma Jig is the blog of Nicholas Thompson and contains any useful tips, sites and general blog-stuff which are considered interesting or handy!
Posted on 22 January 2010 in
security
linux
geek
Has anyone every tried to generate a GPG (or GnuPG) key? I have… and I received this error…
Not enough random bytes available. Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 284 more bytes)
I was remotely logged into the machine (over SSH) so couldn't physically move the mouse or press keys to generate random entropy. The solution turned out to be simply running the following command in a second SSH Shell.
ls -R /
As soon as I ran that, the gpg command in the other window instantly finished creating my 2048 bit key.