Name
pollinate - an Entropy-as-a-Service clientSynopsis
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)