I wonder whether for the average Linux user it is considered as bad -from a point of view of security or any other relevant viewpoints- to have no or almost no entropy left in /dev/random.
Edit: I don't need to generate random numbers (I would use /dev/urandom for that and even for password generation and disk encryption). Just for the fun of it, I have a bash script that generates strings of random characters out of /dev/random and of course, after playing a bit with it, I am left without entropy in /dev/random and it blocks. On IRC I was told it's "bad" to do so, but I wasn't given any reason. Is it bad because the average Linux user automatically generates random things using /dev/random? If so, which program(s) is/are involved?
I also understand that having no entropy left in /dev/random makes the generation of numbers deterministic. But again, is my computer (the average Linux user) in need of truly random numbers?
Edit 2: I've just monitored the entropy level every second in /dev/random during about 3 minutes, where I launched my bash script that uses entropy to generate a string of random character around the beginning of the monitoring. I've made a plot. We can see that indeed, the entropy level oscillates somehow, so some program(s) on my computer are using /dev/random to generate stuff. Is there a way I can list all programs using the file /dev/random?
We can also see that it takes less than a minute to yield "acceptable levels" of entropy once the entropy pool has been emptied.
/dev/urandom
? It should be enough for your needs.