Setting up additional entropy for your Ubuntu VPS with haveged
We've recently ran into an issue with one of our staging servers where a scheduled cron job would occassionally hang for a few minutes before executing. The issue turned out to be due to a low entopy (i.e. randomness) value in /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail
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Randomness in Linux is generated from hardware interrupts such as the keyboard, mouse, and disk/network IO. This goes into a pool which then gets consumed by applications that require randomness for security, such as …