"keyserver receive failed: Try again later" on macOS

[Walt Mankowski]

Good idea! I renamed my .gnupg directory, killed dirmngr, and then tried to receive a key:

% gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 7FE79B445728C8EA0042839E45BCE75B840B1F69
gpg: directory '/Users/waltman/.gnupg' created

It hung for several minutes and then I killed it. I've got a pretty large key, so I tried a few others and had the same result.

The .gnupg directory it creates is very barebones:

% find .gnupg
.gnupg
.gnupg/S.dirmngr
.gnupg/common.conf
.gnupg/crls.d
.gnupg/crls.d/DIR.txt

% cat .gnupg/common.conf
use-keyboxd

% cat .gnupg/crls.d/DIR.txt
v:1:

I'm pretty sure this was working on my old Mac. I won't have a chance to test that until tonight and see if anything's different there. I set this new one up from scratch since it's my first non-Intel Mac, so it's quite possible there are differences.

Walt

On Wed, Jun 18, 2025, at 11:44 AM, Andrew Gallagher wrote:
> On 18 Jun 2025, at 16:15, Walt Mankowski <waltman at pobox.com> wrote:
>> 
>> $ gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 77D4D81DC47D68FA9E9E6A7C5DF19E2B67A7B584
>> gpg: keyserver receive failed: Try again later
>> $ gpg --keyserver hkps://keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys 77D4D81DC47D68FA9E9E6A7C5DF19E2B67A7B584
>> gpg: keyserver receive failed: Try again later
>> $ gpg --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 77D4D81DC47D68FA9E9E6A7C5DF19E2B67A7B584
>> gpg: key 5DF19E2B67A7B584: 1 duplicate signature removed
>> gpg: key 5DF19E2B67A7B584: "Walter C. Mankowski <waltman at pobox.com>" not changed
>> gpg: Total number processed: 1
>> gpg:              unchanged: 1
>> $ gpg --keyserver hkps://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 --recv-keys 77D4D81DC47D68FA9E9E6A7C5DF19E2B67A7B584
>> gpg: keyserver receive failed: No keyserver available
>> $ gpg --keyserver hkps://keyserver.ubuntu.com:11371 --recv-keys 77D4D81DC47D68FA9E9E6A7C5DF19E2B67A7B584
>> gpg: keyserver receive failed: No keyserver available
> Curiouser and curiouser. :-(
> 
> I’ve tested this on my 15.5 Mac with homebrew, but can’t reproduce. I do also have GPGtools installed, which makes it difficult to replicate your environment - but I made sure to kill dirmngr and allow the homebrew gpg to start its own, and I haven’t seen any issues with keyserver connectivity.
> 
> Could you try renaming your .gnupg directory temporarily and checking if the issue persists with a fresh config?
> 
> A
> 
> 
> *Attachments:*
>  • signature.asc
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