[Q] Sending a key to a keyserver

[Bjoern Buerger]

Am Die, 13 Mai 2003 schrieb Eugene Smiley:

> There has been discussion on the PGP-Users mailinglist by some
> PGP employees about dealing with the keyserver issue. They know
> it exists, but the are interested in improving the quality of
> the keyserver vs. synchronizing a bunch of unused keys. Creating
> a solution to the existing problems is not an overnight thing.

In fact, it is. It takes ~5-10 hours to set up a full    =20
synchronized sks keyserver from scratch. They could also just
get a current keyring from one of the synchronized keyserver-admins
and feed it into their own server.    =20

If you ask me, it is pretty unprofessional to sell pgp with
{keyserver,certserver,etc}.pgp.com as predefined Default and
not providing reliable service under those addresses.
Even the two preconfigured pgp.com servers were not=20
synchronized with each other about two weeks ago...

If they are not able to set up a simple keyserver,
they should just fill the default keyserver list of
PGP with some of the open keyservers. That would solve
most of the current problems.

> > Gives me plenty of trouble, since I made a friend change from
> > PGP to GPG and now he can't find his other PGP using friends any
> > more ...

Michael is right. It's a pain. To be clear, the whole keyserver=20
system is a pain at the moment. When I did a survey about OpenPGP=20
usage at our Linux User Group, the keyserver system was the=20
big showstopper for most people.=20

> I tend to send my keys to multiple servers whether I am using PGP
> or GPG to mitigate the issue of people not finding it.
=20
Yes, many people do so. But this is a very bad solution.
=20
Ciao, Bj=F8rn
=20
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OpenPGP Keyserver                       |\  O--vm  /|
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http://sks.keyserver.penguin.de         +-----------+