Re: Randomized TCP client ports

[Daniel Kiper]

Hi Walter,

On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 01:04:20PM -0800, Walter Huf wrote:
> In the course of developing netboot menus, and rebooting my virtual machine
> often, I am running into a problem where Grub is reusing the same TCP
> client ports across reboots, and my server (because of TCP TIME_WAIT)
> objects to this.
>
> I have a small change to set the initial client port based on
> grub_rtc_get_time_ms(), but I'm not sure if that functionality is available
> on all supported platforms. I'd like to provide a general contribution that
> works on all platforms.
>
> Is there a general way to get a pseudo-random integer that is different on
> each boot?

I think that you should take a look, at least, at random module,
grub-core/lib/random.c, etc.

Have a nice weekend,

Daniel