GNU Savannah task #5130: random translator.
See the attached mbox.bz2 containing all the emails concerning this topic
which I was able to gather from public archives. 
This is not up-to-date
anymore, as ?MichaelCasadevall is currently working on this.
Description
Sources of entropy are for example disk access latencies or keystroke patterns
or behavior on networks. This suggests that for implementing a random
translator a kernel part is needed as well, to gather that entropy. That
kernel part would then export the gathered entropy via a kernel device, named
perhaps entropy.
Setup Pseudo Random Devices
Stuck getting SSH to work? You need a pseudo random generator (PRG).
There are several solutions to the lack of /dev/random and /dev/urandom,
but they are not yet in the default installation.
Marcus' work can be downloaded at random.tar.gz. (Identical to http://kilobug.free.fr/hurd/random-64.tar.gz?)
- A patch that was probably already incorporated from August 14, 2002.
- Clemmitt Sigler reported success October 11, 2002 and Marcus described some of the internals.
OSKit Entropy Patch from Derek Davies - Jan 2003.
- See also this page.
- Note that this patch can (and should) be used with this OSKit NIC patch.
Sune Kirkeby's incomplete port of the Linux /dev/{,u}random device driver
- The files, including a patch for GNU Mach.
Quick and dirty way:
sudo cp /bin/bash /dev/random sudo ln -s random /dev/urandom
Setup Tips
Here are some tips on how to actually setup the two random devices using
Kilobugs' random-64 server.
His tarball is a complete Hurd server including a pre-built binary - so you
don't need GCC or magic fingers for this! 
After untaring the package you copy the random binary to the /hurd
directory. Then you setup the translators for random and urandom.
# settrans -c /dev/random /hurd/random \
--seed-file /var/run/random-seed --secure
# settrans -c /dev/urandom /hurd/random \
--seed-file /var/run/urandom-seed --fast
# chmod 0644 /dev/random /dev/urandom