"keyserver receive failed: Try again later" on macOS

[Walt Mankowski]

I figured out what the problem was this morning. It wasn't name resolution, although I suspected that as well. Instead it turned out to be the port.

When I changed the command to

gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com::11371 --recv-keys 77D4D81DC47D68FA9E9E6A7C5DF19E2B67A7B584

then it retrieved the key as expected. I added the port to gpg.conf and now everything is fine.

I did notice that /etc/services on macOS has two entries for hkp:

hkp             11371/udp    # OpenPGP HTTP Keyserver
hkp             11371/tcp    # OpenPGP HTTP Keyserver

I tried commenting out the udp version and restarting dirmngr, but that had no effect.

Walt

On Mon, Jun 16, 2025, at 5:53 AM, Andrew Gallagher wrote:
> On 14 Jun 2025, at 21:36, Walt Mankowski via Gnupg-users <gnupg-users at gnupg.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Every time I try to import a key, it fails almost immediately with the error
>> 
>> gpg: keyserver receive failed: Try again later
>> 
>> I've tried a number of different keyservers and keep getting the same error. I have an Ubuntu box on the same network. I've run the same command on each box, for example:
>> 
>> gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 77D4D81DC47D68FA9E9E6A7C5DF19E2B67A7B584
>> 
>> This imports the key on Ubuntu but gives me the "Try again later" error on macOS.
>> 
>> I looked online for help but didn't find very much. I've set ~/.gnupg/dirmngr.conf to
>> 
>> log-file ~/.gnupg/dirmngr.log
>> debug-level guru
>> standard-resolver
>> 
>> and restarted dirmngr, but that had very little effect. In particular nothing gets logged to dirmngr.log.
> 
> This is most likely a name resolution error. What are the contents of your /etc/resolv.conf file?
> 
> A
> 
> 
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