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.
rather than producing hex text sha512sum(1) output, convert each two hex digits into a byte of binary data
options to pass through to curl(1)
device to seed (default is /dev/urandom); note, you can use - to print to stdout
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
ignore SSL/TLS certificate errors (use of this option is highly discouraged)
remote pollen(8) server pool to interact with; this option can be specified multiple times to interact with multiple servers in a pool
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
remote pollen(8) server to interact with; if this option is used, the pool is ignored, and only a single server is used
handle network errors strictly and exit non-zero for any network error encountered, otherwise default is to warn
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
silence any log messages
time in seconds you're willing to wait for a response from the server, uses timeout(1)
Print the user-agent that is used and exit immediately.
pollen(8), timeout(1)
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.