Problem importing a secret key

David Shaw dshaw@jabberwocky.com
Sat Mar 30 17:32:01 2002


On Sat, Mar 30, 2002 at 01:38:45PM +0100, Oyvind A. Holm wrote:
> On 2002-03-30 13:16-0000 Teiva martin wrote:
> 
> > I have a problem importing a secret key from another
> > computer. I've made a "gpg --export-secret-key --armor
> > teiva", scp the key to the other computer, but there, all I
> > have is a :
> > teiva@zephyr:~/.gnupg$ gpg --import
> > --allow-secret-key-import teiva_pvkey.asc
> > gpg: key B7E9F209: no user ID
> > gpg: Total number processed: 1
> > gpg: secret keys read: 1
> >
> > What did I made wrong ?
> 
> Judging from the error message it seems as GPG also wants the public
> key. The secret key contains no personal information, so GnuPG has no
> user ID that refer to this secret key. Try to import the public key
> first, then import the secret key the way you did.

This is not correct - the secret key should contain everything in the
public key except for key signatures (other than the self-signature).

It's possible you don't have a user ID packet in your secret key for
some reason.  Can you tell me what GnuPG displays when you add
--verbose to your command line?

David

-- 
   David Shaw  |  dshaw@jabberwocky.com  |  WWW http://www.jabberwocky.com/
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
   "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX.
      We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson