Greetings everybody, new user here

[Robert J. Hansen]

> Hi everyone.  I just signed up to this list and thought to introduce
> myself.

Welcome to the community!  We're a pretty friendly bunch here.  Hasn't
been any blood drawn in quite a while, honestly.  :)

With respect to delays in the keyserver network, the major address that
people tend to use (pool.sks-keyservers.net) is not a single box but a
confederation of them.  It's sort of like how when you visit google.com
you're visiting one of thousands of boxes configured to respond to that
address.  If by some chance you and your correspondent happen to hit the
exact same keyserver the propagation delay will be measured in
milliseconds.  Otherwise the certificate has to be propagated from one
machine's database to another.  This process, while normally very quick
(sub-minute), sometimes has problems.

Imagine there's Box A and Box B and then the Big Cloud of Boxes that
represents the keyserver network.  A gets all its updates from B, and B
gets its updates from the Big Cloud of Boxes.  If for some reason the
network link from A to B goes down, A will fall behind B (and the rest
of the Big Cloud of Boxes) in synchronization.

The good news is that most of the time propagation speed is extremely
fast.  Network problems do occur, but generally they're not significant
enough to be a major worry.

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