PGP: Not enough random bytes available. Please do some other work to give the OS a chance to collect more entropy

linux random gnupg entropy
user1524529 picture user1524529 · Jul 29, 2012 · Viewed 34.9k times · Source

Setup : Ubuntu Server on Virtual Machine with 6 cores and 3GB of RAM.

when I am trying to generate a asymmetric key pair via GPG like this gpg --gen-key . I get the following error :

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

I tried to google a little bit. This is what I realise , I need to fire up another terminal and type in cat /udev/random --> It randomly generates a series of randomly generated values to increase the entropy.

I dont see any change in here watch cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail

and it still persists to give me the same error

Answer

zdenekca picture zdenekca · Oct 19, 2013

Run the following:

find / > /dev/null

That helped me quickly to complete my key generation.

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