Re: Error with random generator

[Joshua Branson]

Samuel Thibault <samuel.thibault@gnu.org> writes:

Herein follows a short rant.  I'm not the best person to speak about
this, but I really do appreciate Samuel's work on the Hurd.  I hope I'm
not speaking out of turn.

> Hello,
>
> Please always keep the mailing list in Cc, so that I am not the only
> recipient of the mail. Writing to me only means risking falling in
> the middle of my vacations and thus not getting an answer for weeks,
> or that I just don't have the time to answer and thus you would at
> best get a terse answer, or worse, no answer at all... Conversely,
> keeping the list in Cc means avoiding all these issues completely,
> you'll involve all the community to help you, make the answers you
> get available to everyone, and even archived for web crawlers to find
> them whenever somebody has the same issue.

This is slightly off topic, but this is the reason that Samuel rocks.
He is incredibly patient, very responsive, and super helpful for
everything!  In short, Samuel rocks!  Perhaps I can use this as a time
to apologize for being a jerk to Samuel a few years ago when I was
frustrated with the wiki and blamed Samuel...Sorry about that sir.

>
> Almudena Garcia, le lun. 04 juin 2018 13:52:55 +0200, a ecrit:
>> Finnaly, by any reason, the /dev/random and /dev/urandom don't shows any new
>> error, and start without problems.
>> I tried restart the server, but It says that the device or resource is busy.
>> 
>> How can I restart the server? I want to add the correct file in the server
>
> You can use setttrans -fgap for this, to both make the existing
> translator go away (-fg) and start another one (-a) and record that
> (-p).
>
> Now, this is extremely basic knowledge about translators. I don't know
> if that's properly documented. Either it is, and it wasn't advertised
> enough for you to find it and thus somebody has to improve that. Or it
> isn't, and it needs to be documented and advertised, and again somebody
> has to do it.

Samuel is absolutely correct about this too.  One excellent area of
opportunity for the Hurd project is documentation.  The wiki is a bit
dated in some places.  And this is NOT Samuel's fault.  A lot of time he
is the only one doing EVERYTHING.  He simply can't do it all.

>
> (No, I don't have the time to do it, and there is no reason why I should
> be the one to do it: a lot other people here have the knowledge to do
> it, and if it's only a matter of permissions on the wiki, that can be
> solved very easily, so it's no excuse)

This is also super correct.  Samuel is a leading expert in concurrency,
systems programming, and operating system research.  His time would be
better spent developing cool new features for the Hurd.  Unfortunately,
he has to spend a lot of time, doing mundane maintenance things to keep
the Hurd alive.  If we had someone (myself included), willing to do the
boring maintenance tasks, Samuel would have more free time to develop
the Hurd instead of maintaining it.

>
> Samuel