AES256 in PyCrypto

[mirandacascade at yahoo.com]

Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch wrote:

> `a` must be of length 32 for AES256.  And the length of `plainText` must
> be a multiple of 16 because it's a block cypher algorithm.

Thank you.  I have some follow up questions and 1 tangential question.

Follow up question:
Would it be correct to infer that:
 a) the AES.pyd extension module (plus whatever additional files within
the PyCrypto package that it uses) has the capability to perform AES256
encryption?
 b) the AES256 encryption happens based on the characteristics of the
input to the new() method...if the first argument has a length of 32,
the result will be AES256-style encryption?
 c) will AES256-style encryption also happen if the first argument to
the new() method has a length that is a multiple of 32, e.g. 64?

Tangential question:
Is there functionality available (either in the PyCrypto package or
some other package) that generates an initialization vector that can be
used as input to the new() method?  What prompts this question is that
the original posting referenced a snippet of C# code; some other
related snippets I saw seemed to suggest that:
a) a RijndaelManaged() class gets instantiated
b) that class has a GenerateIV() method which appears to populate
someting in a IV property
c) the application that was employing the AES256 encryption made use of
the left-most 16 characters of the IV property
So, I was curious whether something analgous exists in the Python
world.

Thank you.