pollinate - an Entropy-as-a-Service client
pollinate [-c|--curl-opts CURL_OPTS] [-d|--device DEVICE]
[-i|--insecure] [-n|--no-challenge] [-r|--reseed] [-s|--server SERVER1
[-s|--server SERVER2] ...]
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.
- -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.
This manpage and the utility were written by Dustin Kirkland
<kirkland@ubuntu.com> 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.