Creating a seed for multi-factor authentication

To set up multi-factor authentication (MFA), you must create a secret seed for use by the one-time password generator and the back-end MFA system.

Prerequisites

A Linux system.
Access to the command line shell.

Procedure

Generate a 30 character seed from the urandom Linux device file and store it in the shell variable SEED:

Example
```
[user@host01 ~]$ SEED=$(head -10 /dev/urandom | sha512sum | cut -b 1-30)
```
Print the seed by running echo on the SEED variable:

Example
```
[user@host01 ~]$ echo $SEED
492dedb20cf51d1405ef6a1316017e
```
Configure the one-time password generator and the back-end MFA system to use the same seed.

Reference

For more information, see the following:

Multi-factor authentication