Re: [PLUG] What keyserver to use?

[David Shaw <dshaw@jabberwocky.com>]

On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 11:15:19PM -0400, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 05, 2003 at 06:34:49PM +0000, John Beck wrote:
> > My question is, if my key id is my email address, what information should I be
> > putting in the <keyserver> field?
> 
> Your keyid isn't your email address, it's the last four bytes (eight
> characters in hex representation) of your key's fingerprint. Your
> email address works because GnuPG (and most other PGP
> implementations) do a string search across the information in the
> key when you give them a string.
> 
> I actually don't remember whether using your email address will work
> for --send-key. I'm pretty sure it won't for --recv-key (because it
> would put a ridiculous load on the keyserver to go do a pattern
> match across all the data in its whole keyring).

Yes.  --send-keys will work for the reason you say (the string
search), but recv-keys requires a hex keyid (either 8-digit, 16-digit,
or fingerprint).

> Also, I think ~/.gnupg/options is deprecated; you might want to
> switch that to gpg.conf. (It'll work the same way for now, but isn't
> guaranteed to in the future, right David?)

Correct.  GnuPG uses "gpg.conf" if it is present, and "options" if it
is present.  If both are present, it uses "gpg.conf" and complains
about "options".  It isn't guaranteed to work this way the future, but
for this particular detail, the future is a very long way away because
there are zillions of GnuPG installations with "options" files.

David

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