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Comment by RX14 | Hacker News Reader

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RX14·

I hope they spend some of that money on the keyservers, they seem to be down every time I want to grab some gpg keys.

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Keyservers are hosted by volunteers as part of a distributed pool of hosts:

https://sks-keyservers.net/

And the pool's automated management infrastructure prunes misbehaving hosts pretty quickly (e.g. not responding, out of sync, etc). See "servers in the pool" and "servers currently not in the pool" here:

https://sks-keyservers.net/status/

Well I'm just reporting the reality that the keyservers are down when I want to use them, almost without fail.

I suspect that gpg isn't trying multiple servers in the pool but only trying the first A record it finds. I've had to edit hosts to select a functioning key server in the pool many times.

Before I learned about the SKS Keyservers pool, I had my "keyserver hkp://pgp.mit.edu" in my ~/.gnupg/dirmngr.conf, and that never failed for me unless I was in a strangely firewalled environment. Maybe try that?

I run one of the many keyservers. I have various checks running regularly to make sure everything's fine, both on my own server, some selected other servers, and the pool in general.It's rare to have an issue, and bad servers get taken out the pool within an hour thanks to the pool's automated checks (which are completely separate from my own).

What sort of issues are you seeing? What server are you querying? Where in the world are you located?

There's a bunch of servers out there -- https://sks-keyservers.net/status/ -- but most tend to be in North America and Europe. That might be an issue, depending on where you are.

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