On Sun, 7 Aug 2022, Andrew Gallagher <andr...@andrewg.com> wrote:
On 7 Aug 2022, at 17:28, Jay Sulzberger via Gnupg-users <gnupg-users@gnupg.org>
wrote:
Andrew, do the sks keyservers work today?
I was able to find the key by going to
https://keyserver.ubuntu.com/
and putting
EC6C2905F0F93C0373946CA10642427A5FF780BE
into the search box.
Do you mean SKS the software (i.e. github.com/sks-keyserver) or SKS
the protocol/network? The answer in both cases is ???yes???, but for
different values of ???yes???. ????
In the past two days, I have come to understand how little I know
about the design, the practical use, and the statistics of usage, of
gnupg. I think that learning some more is worth the effort.
What doesn???t work any more is the sks-keyservers.net pool, which had
become a nightmare to manage. This has been taken by many to mean
that the SKS network itself is down, but this is absolutely not the
case.
Ah.
sks-keyserver still works, but is IMO not suitable for use in
production unless you are an expert willing to roll your own load
balancing pool and recompile the code to update blacklists (there
are still a few such brave souls left). This may change in the
future ??? the software is maintained but hasn???t had a significant
feature bump in some time.
Ah, oi.
The SKS network also still works, and depending on your choice of
metric is probably more stable today than it has ever been. The
reasons are twofold: many operators have migrated from sks-keyserver
to hockeypuck, and most of the rest have shut down. This means that
although there are fewer keyservers now than five years ago, the
ones that do exist (including keyserver.ubuntu.com) are generally
much more reliable.
Ah, OK.
Information about the SKS network can be found at https://spider.pgpkeys.eu
A
Andrew, thank you much for this useful short introduction to these
obscure things!
oo--JS.
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