Question about fingerprints and keys uploaded to keyservers

Newton Hammet newton at hammet.net
Sat Feb 21 22:28:09 CET 2004


Hello everyone again and thanks to gabriel, David and others who
responded.  I think for me the mystery might be solved.

keyserver.net appears "broken", at least with respect to fingerprint.

subkeys.pgp.net appears to be OK, with respect to fingerprint in that
the fingerprint it reports for my new key is identical to the finger
print that gpg-1.2.4 reports. (actually I have compiled gpg-1.2.4 from
source and have made a single change, allowing for a maximum RSA key
size of up to 8192 bits... a very simple coding change).

But it appears you can download my public key from keyserver.net and
that key works just fine too, since someone used my key downloaded from
that keyserver to send me an encrypted email.

Regards,
Newton



On Sat, 2004-02-21 at 16:24, David Shaw wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 05:08:32PM -0500, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
> > On Sat, Feb 21, 2004 at 02:52:01PM -0500, David Shaw wrote:
> > > We did.  keyserver.net is, in fact, horribly broken in many ways (this
> > > particular problem is just the tip of the iceberg).  It's never worked
> > > properly.  I mailed them about fixing it a few years ago, but all the
> > > mail disappeared into a black hole, so I gave up.
> > 
> > That's wonderful, but Newton explicitly stated his key fingerprint
> > as:
> > 
> >   785F DFF3 7029 3FBD 45CE  747C 93CA E808 136F C036
> > 
> > and that he'd sent the key to subkeys.pgp.net (by implication, in
> > referencing that he'd sent it to the keyservers "in his signature")...
> > which has never heard of keyid 136FC036 (as in, the last 64 bits
> > of the fingerprint).
> > 
> > So, unless you're suggesting that something about subkeys.pgp.net is
> > also broken, there is something odd going on. Is synchronization
> > between the various subkeys DNS RR servers flaky right now?
> 
> Might be.  It happens every now and then that one server doesn't sync
> for a bit.
> 
> > > As always, the answer is subkeys.pgp.net.  It Just Works(tm).
> > 
> > In this case, it would appear to have Just Not Worked, at least for
> > a little while. :^>
> 
> Close enough.  I'd change the slogan to "It Just Works More Often Than
> The Other Solutions", but it doesn't read quite as well. ;)
> 
> Maybe the synchronization was slow for a bit.  The SKS servers have
> their own sync algorithm, and the PKS servers use email to sync.  (SKS
> uses email to sync with PKS).  Either way, network connectivity is
> needed (though the server must have had some connectivity to be able
> to accept the key submission in the first place).
> 
> subkeys.pgp.net is made up of three machines in round robin rotation
> (Jason's fixed PKS, and two SKS, if I recall).  Who knows which one
> the original key submissionw as sent to and which one you hit when you
> tried.  I keep meaning to show the IP address (under some high
> verbosity level) that is used when making keyserver calls.
> 
> David
> ----
> 

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-- 
Public Key: 4096R/136FC036 2004-02-09 Newton Hammet <newton at hammet.net>
Key fingerprint = 785F DFF3 7029 3FBD 45CE 747C 93CA E808 136F C036
Key servers: subkeys.pgp.net, et al





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