James Healy

Gpg General Error

01 May 2007

I’ve never been able to refresh all the keys in the GPG keyring stored on my Xen host with rimuhosting.com, only ever managing to get the following cryptic output:

jh@gir:~$ gpg --refresh
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key C8692763 via hkp://subkeys.pgp.net: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key C6B3AE7E via hkp://subkeys.pgp.net/: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key 4B729625 via hkp://keyring.debian.org: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key B83D761C via hkp://keyserver.kjsl.com:11371: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key 6D67F790 via hkp://keyring.debian.org: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key 8F068012 via hkp://wwwkeys.us.pgp.net: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key 6E25E283 via hkp://pgpkeys.mit.edu: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key 6538F5BF via http://keyserver.debian.org: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key 5706A4B4 via hkp://subkeys.pgp.net: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key 330C4A75 via x-hkp://subkeys.pgp.net: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key 46399138 via http://quiston.tpsa.com/crypto/0x46399138.asc: general error
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: WARNING: unable to refresh key 3FD25C84 via hkp://keyring.debian.org: general error
gpg: refreshing 1095 keys from hkp://subkeys.pgp.net
gpg: keyserver communications error: general error
gpg: keyserver refresh failed: general error

For future reference, it appears that the refresh function requires a surprisingly large chunk of memory to operate, and on my low memory VPS it wasn’t able to get enough. Temporarily stopping some memory hungry processes while I ran the refresh worked like a charm.

Instead of providing a nice message explaining the issue we’re given a cryptic “general error”, so I’ve filed a wishlist bug in the gnupg bug tracker.

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