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  <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.