pollinate(1)

✨ NAME ✨

okay so pollinate(1) is literally the pollinate command, and it's an Entropy-as-a-Service client 🦋 bestie it's giving randomness on demand 💅

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

pollinate [-c|--curl-opts CURL_OPTS] [-d|--device DEVICE]
[-i|--insecure] [-n|--no-challenge] [-r|--reseed] [-s|--server SERVER1
[-s|--server SERVER2] ...]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so pollinate is an entropy as a service client 🧚 it goes and fetches a random seed from one or more remote servers, then feeds that seed into a (pseudo) random number generator ✨ this is lowkey essential in cloud and virtual machine environments that don't have a lot of entropy sources to work with 😭 main character energy for sure 💜

🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

• -b, --binary — instead of spitting out hex text from sha512sum(1), it converts each pair of hex digits into one byte of binary data 🤓
• -c, --curl-opts CURL_OPTS — passes options through to curl(1) 🫶
• -d, --device DEVICE — picks the device to seed (it defaults to /dev/urandom) 🍓 heads up, you can use - to print to stdout instead
• -n, --no-challenge — turns off the challenge/response part of the protocol 🙈 this gives you a compatibility mode so you can talk to any entropy server, like random.org or news.google.com
• -i, --insecure — ignores SSL/TLS certificate errors 💀 (use of this option is highly discouraged, bestie, seriously)
• -p, --pool SERVER — the remote pollen(8) server pool you want to interact with 🌈 you can use this option multiple times to hit multiple servers in a pool
• -r, --reseed — by default, pollinate technically only needs to run successfully once ever 👑 use this option if someone wants to run it more than once and re-seed the PRNG
• -s, --server SERVER — the remote pollen(8) server you want to interact with 🦋 if you use this, the pool gets ignored and only that single server is used
• --strict — handles network errors strictly, so it exits non-zero for any network error it runs into 😤 otherwise the default vibe is just to warn
• -t, --testing — tests communications with the pollen(8) server 🔥 note that this will NOT actually seed your PRNG, it just checks that the local client can talk to the remote servers; also, this option forces DEVICE to stdout
• -q, --quiet — silences any log messages 🤫
• -w, --wait WAIT — the time in seconds you're willing to wait for a response from the server ⏰ this uses timeout(1)
• --print-user-agent — prints the user-agent that gets used and exits immediately 🎀

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

pollen(8), timeout(1)

👑 AUTHOR 👑

okay so this manpage and the utility were written by Dustin Kirkland <kirkland@ubuntu.com> for Ubuntu systems (but anyone can use them 🫶). 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 🌈

bestie that's the whole pollinate(1) page 💅 pollinate version from 28 November 2012, manual page for pollinate(1), go be randomly seeded and slay the day 🧚✨