How long should it take to generate 300 bytes of entropy on a VPS?

Question

I'm running NetBSD on a Xen VPS, and I'm trying to generate a gpg keypair. I've gotten most of the way there, but now I'm getting the following error message:

Not enough random bytes available.  Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more entropy! (Need 300 more bytes)

This has been the status for about 10 hours now, and I've been doing things like installing packages from source in another session.

Is the process hung? Is this a known-issue of some sort? Can it really take that much effort to generate 300 bytes of entropy?

Thanks.

UPDATE: The source of this issue is that NetBSD domU's don't have an entropy source enabled by default. You should manually enable the network interfaces as a source of entropy using the rndctl utility.

Answer 1

It should not. I would try restarting the process. In addition to that, there is not so much you can do, in addition to digging to source code to see what is wrong.

As you probably already know, if your server is completely empty, it is possible that generating random data takes long time. However, installing packages and poking around should be enough to fix that.