pgp servers hanging

[David Shaw]

On Fri, Feb 15, 2008 at 02:00:09AM +0000, Matt Richards wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm having an issue with GnuPG, I currently use it with mutt and everything was ok but now when I view an email that has sign
> ed data and I dont have the key of the person that signed the email, mutt hangs.
> 
> This appears to be due to gnupg attempting to request the key via a keyserver and not having much success.
> 
> The keyserver I was using with no problems is hkp://subkeys.pgp.net and since then I have tried a number of keyservers including mit's without much success, I did find one keyserver that i could connect to (LDAP based i think) but there didn't appear to be many keys avaliable.
> 
> I'm not behind any proxy servers or anything like that.
> 
> Does anybody know what might be going on? or are the keyservers just down?

subkeys.pgp.net is a virtual keyserver.  The name actually points to
multiple different servers run by different people.

If any of these servers are down, keyserver requests can block for a
while until there is a timeout and GPG gives up.  You can change the
timeout value (it defaults to 2 minutes) with:

  keyserver-options timeout=xxxxx

Where xxxxx is the number of seconds to wait for the keyserver.

David