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Name

pollinate - an Entropy-as-a-Service client

Synopsis

pollinate [-c|--curl-opts CURL_OPTS] [-d|--device DEVICE] [-i|--insecure] [-n|--no-challenge] [-r|--reseed] [-s|--server SERVER1 [-s|--server SERVER2] ...]

Description

pollinate is an entropy as a service client. It will fetch a random seed from one or more remote servers, and feed those into a (pseudo) random number generator. This is often useful in cloud and virtual machine environments with limited sources of entropy.

Options

-b|--binary rather than producing hex text sha512sum(1) output, convert each two hex digits into a byte of binary data

-c|--curl-opts CURL_OPTS options to pass through to curl(1)

-d|--device DEVICE device to seed (default is /dev/urandom); note, you can use - to print to stdout

-n|--no-challenge disable the challenge/response portion of the protocol; this enables a compatibility mode to speak to any entropy server, like random.org or news.google.com

-i|--insecure ignore SSL/TLS certificate errors (use of this option is highly discouraged)

-p|--pool SERVER remote pollen(8) server pool to interact with; this option can be specified multiple times to interact with multiple servers in a pool

-r|--reseed by default, pollinate technically only needs to run successfully once ever; this option should be used if someone wants run more than once, and re-seed the PRNG

-s|--server SERVER remote pollen(8) server to interact with; if this option is used, the pool is ignored, and only a single server is used

--strict handle network errors strictly and exit non-zero for any network error encountered, otherwise default is to warn

-t|--testing test communications with the pollen(8) server; note that this will NOT actually seed your PRNG, but only verify that the local client can communicate with the remote servers; note that this option forces DEVICE to stdout

-q|--quiet silence any log messages

-w|--wait WAIT time in seconds you're willing to wait for a response from the server, uses timeout(1)

--print-user-agent Print the user-agent that is used and exit immediately.

See Also

    pollen(8), timeout(1)

Author

This manpage and the utility were written by Dustin Kirkland <[email protected]> for Ubuntu systems (but may be used by others). Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 3 published by the Free Software Foundation. On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL, or on the web at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.txt.