[Q]:Generate Unique ID's

[Paul Rubin]

Jason Creighton <androflux at REMOVETOREPLYsofthome.net> writes:
> 1 char Memory devices
> ...
> 8 = /dev/random      Nondeterministic random number gen.
> 9 = /dev/urandom     Faster, less secure random number gen.

/dev/urandom is the one to use.  It's a cryptographic PRNG seeded by
entropy from /dev/random.  /dev/random actually tries to estimate
system entropy gathered from hardware interrupts, and if there's not
enough saved up, it blocks.  It buffers up a few kbytes(?) of random
data but once you exhaust that, you can only read a few bytes per
second from it, if that.