How to prevent the entropy pool from running dry?

[Sunner]

I ran into a problem when doing an "emerge -u world" this friday.
The problem was emerge hanging when emerging Imagemagick, during the checking for a PDF writing device, and after searching the forums I found a thread that suggested this was cause the entropy pool had run out of data, and indeed, it was impossible to get anything from /dev/random.

I was doing this over SSH, so I didn't have console access to the box, and shortly after this happening, SSH went down, I was still able to ping the box, and port 22 was open, but I couldn't connect to the box on any port(ssh, http, ftp), or actually I could connect, but the connection would just lock with no output.
So, when I got back today, I found the box in a rather strange state, on vc1 I had a bunch of kernel messages that didn't say much, just a bunch of ls, sed, etc commands.
I could change to other vc's, so it was definately accepting keyboard input, but actually typing in a username was impossible, trying to type anything yielded no reaction, so in the end I had to do a hard reboot.

Now, since I couldn't access the box, I couldn't really see what the problem was, and I can't find anything useful in the logs on the box, so with nothing to go on, Im gonna have to blame this on the entropy pool running dry, unless someone else has any kind of good idea about what might have caused it.

Obviously, I dont want this happening again, rebooting to solve a problem is a bit "windowy", so what can I do to make sure the pool doesnt run out of data again?
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//Sunner

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