HP-UX Secure Shell and PRNGD

[Laszlo Csizmadia]

Is there any way to bring HP's ssh to use prngd random data source and not the /opt/ssh/etc/ssh_prng_cmds? The ssh was still slow inspite of that I have removed the stupid command from /opt/ssh/etc/ssh_prng_cmds. Prngd was installed and started as: /usr/local/bin/prngd /var/run/egd-pool. Is HP's ssh using this egd-pool socket? How to make sure of that? Because ssh doesn't seem faster after starting prngd.
Any help will be appreciated.
Thanks.

[Dusan Krasa]

I think that better then PRNG is /dev/random, like in linux distr.
I known only dynamic loadable kernel module for HPUX 11i.
Look at this forum:
http://bizforums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/0,,0x6edae822e739d711abdc0090277a778c,00.html

Or direct link:
http://newfdawg.com/SSHpart5.htm

[Michael Kelly_5]

I don't know about HP's ssh but we use OpenSSH and PRNG and we compiled it to use PRNGD.
The actual path to the egd-pool/socket is hardcoded in the ssh-rand-helper program.
You could try running strings -a on your ssh-rand-helper program to to see if it is trying to access the prngd socket but I suspect that it isn't.
You will (almost certainly) need to recompile your ssh server to use prngd.

HTH,
Michael.

[Laszlo Csizmadia]

Thanks.
The correct answer would be:
- install and run prngd
- compile prngd-ctl.c
- put these line into ssh_prngd_cmds:
"prngd-ctl read 64" /usr/local/bin/prngd-ctl 0.50
- and other fast commands like:
"echo \\c" /bin/echo 0.00

HP's ssh compiled with no prngd socket(with-prngd-socket=) so it can use any egd-pool directly. Only with this usefull trick.