[onerng talk] OneRNG LED malfunction?

[Paul Campbell]

On Sun, 05 Jul 2015 18:32:50 Max Nager wrote:
> I am running Ubuntu 14.04 and after calling cat /dev/random >/dev/null the
> LED does not dim. The case is also pretty hot, but the LED has never
> blinked so I am not sure whether it is a temperature failure or not.

if it's on solid it doesn't indicate a temperature failure - the LED means two 
things:

- normally it's on when the internal OneRNG entropy pool is full (your case), 
it dims when it's continually being drained and filled when rngd is pulling 
data from it

- when it detects that the avalanche circuit has shut down (strings of too 
many 0000s of 1111s on the input it starts to flash every second to indicate)

What I think people who are seeing possible temperature failures are seeing a 
combination of these two states.

My guess is that you are seeing a failure and rngd is not starting up - you 
can test it by logging on as root and entering

	/bin/onerng.sh daemon /dev/ttyACM0

(replace ttyACM0 by whatever dmesg says your OneRNG is connected to)

We've had a few cases of people who've had problems because of issues with the 
Python gpg library - you'll see a failure verifying the firmware's signature - 
you can disable the irmware check in /etc/onerng.conf

	Paul

PS: more generally - the first batch of reworked devices are on their way back 
to China for shipping, they run nice and cool - I'll be announcing how we're 
going to do replacements as a Kickstarter status posting in the next week or 
so