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I am playing with GPGTools on a Mac and quite liking it so far, the GUI makes it nice to handle keys. I am using the default hkps://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net key server, to which I have uploaded my public key.

However after a day, if I look for my public key on there using the key ID, it still tells me that no key can be found. Is this normal? Does it normally take this long for a key to show up on a key server?

user1301428
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    It [seems](https://gpgtools.lighthouseapp.com/projects/66001/tickets/25-maybe-use-another-keyserver) the default server you used is not reliable. –  Aug 16 '15 at 13:05
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    @begueradj Yep, that seems to be it. The funny thing is that I can retrieve all keys if run a lookup from GPG Keychain, but not if I use the web interface. – user1301428 Aug 16 '15 at 17:51
  • By coincident I also uploaded my public key yesterday using GPGtools for mac to hkps://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net. After which I was unable to locate it, however after about 15 min it was available on pgp.mit.edu while still not being avaible on hkps://hkps.pool.sks-keyservers.net. – PowerToLuke Dec 05 '15 at 17:31

1 Answers1

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The SKS key server pool is not a single key server, but a whole pool of servers administrated by different users all of the world. By using DNS round robin, you will be assigned to a different one from time to time (actually, you will get a new set of servers every 60 seconds).

It can happen that a single server is having issues, and there is some delay based on the synchronization schema these servers are using. If a key did not spread through-out the key server network after some minutes or hours, upload it again. If you want to spread a key rather fast, upload it to multiple servers in the network to shorten up the replication paths (and be less dependent on single machines failing or being slow at replicating keys).

Generally, the SKS key server pool is pretty stable and reliable, as (temporarily) broken servers get kicked out of the pool for a given time automatically (and will be re-included as soon as they're working again).

Jens Erat
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  • Then the web interface must be extremely unlucky, as it has never worked in retrieving keys for me :D Retrieval from GPG Keychain has always worked instead. – user1301428 Sep 11 '15 at 10:43
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    How did you query it? If not searching for user IDs / mail addresses but using key IDs instead, be sure to prefix `0x`, the SKS key server software is very picky here. – Jens Erat Sep 11 '15 at 15:16
  • Also noticed on Windows with Kleopatra the search will return zero results if you keep spaces inside the ID (from grouping). So to recap - you must take the full fingerprint and cut out last four groups and then remove spaces and then add 0x. There must be a missing manual somewhere I overlooked! – Ryan Apr 06 '21 at 16:55