man > pollinate(1)

pollinate(1)                                  pollinate                                 pollinate(1)

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  op‐
              tion 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 <kirkland AT 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.

pollinate                                 28 November 2012                              pollinate(1)