In the last blog post Dealing with a Lack of Entropy on your OpenShift Cluster we deployed the rng-tools software as a DaemonSet in a cluster. By using a DaemonSet, we took advantage of the tools that Kubernetes gives us for deploying an application to all targeted nodes in a cluster. This worked well for getting the rng daemon up and running on nodes that required it, but not all software will work this way.

Introduction The Linux Kernel supplies two sources of random numbers, /dev/random and /dev/urandom. Theses character devices can supply random numbers to any application running on your machine. The random numbers supplied by the kernel on these devices come from the Linux kernel’s random-number entropy pool. The random-number entropy pool contains “sufficiently random” numbers meaning they are good for use in things like secure communications. But what happens if the random-number entropy pool runs out of numbers?