gnupg keyrings // question / request

[vedaal at hush.com]

On Tue, 19 Jul 2005 21:05:05 -0700 Thomas Jones 
<admin at buddhalinux.com> wrote:


>Remove the secring.gpg file. Replace it with a shortcut to the
>location of your private key that is on your USB drive.
>
>So now every time the GnuPG engine attempts to access your private
>key, it will
>be directed to the actual key on the USB medium.


this sounded very promising,

but i couldn't get it to work ;-((


this is what was tried:(on win xp pro)

[1] secring.gpg was erased (eraser 5.7)
[2] in the directory c:\gnupg, a shortcut was created to the 
secring.gpg on the usb drive
[3] the shortcut was named secring.gpg
[4] windows confirmed that gpg.exe is to be used to open all .gpg 
files

this is what happened:

[1] encrypted a test text file to my default key, and saved it as 
c:\r\t1.txt

[2] typed gpg c:\r\t1.txt
and here is the gnupg output:

c:\gnupg>gpg c:\r\t1.txt
gpg: NOTE: THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT VERSION!
gpg: It is only intended for test purposes and should NOT be
gpg: used in a production environment or with production keys!
gpg: keyring `C:/GnuPG\secring.gpg' created
gpg: armor: BEGIN PGP MESSAGE
gpg: armor header: Version: PGP 8.1
gpg: armor header: Comment: Acts of Kindness better the World, and 
protect the S
oul
:marker packet:
 50 47 50
:pubkey enc packet: version 3, algo 1, keyid ACA163F604ADEE20
        data: [4092 bits]
gpg: public key is 04ADEE20
:encrypted data packet:
        length: 582
gpg: using subkey 04ADEE20 instead of primary key 6A589A97
gpg: encrypted with 4096-bit RSA key, ID 04ADEE20, created 2001-04-
26
      "vedaal nistar <vedaal at hotmail.com>"
gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available

[3] apparently gnupg did not recognize the shortcut,
and proceeded to act as if there were no secring present, and 
created a nullfile named secring.gpg in the gnupg home directory,
but couldn't access the real secring.gpg on the usb drive

so,
what did you do differently to get it to work on your system?
 
tia,

vedaal

also, n.b.
am not sure if this is a corruption in my registry, from having 
previous gnupg versions on it,
but seem to have a persistent forward slash instead of a backward 
slash,
and only in the first part of the path c:/gnupg

so,
when i installed 1.4.2rc2,
everything worked except for the idea module loading

but it was able to load after changing the option in ggp.conf to 
read:
load-extension c:/gnupg\idea.dll

no other problems in 1.4.2 rc 2

and Thanks! for fixing the signing issue with rsa keys in pgp !

1.4.2rc2 now verifies the sigs


vedaal





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