Arch Linux

someguynamedmatt

Member

From: Los Angeles, CA

Registered: 2017-11-06

Posts: 11

gpg: keyserver search failed: General error

I was trying to get mullvad-vpn set up on my machine and when it asked if I was okay with importing a PGP key (and I said yes), I got the following error:

gpg: keyserver receive failed: General error

In an attempt to narrow down where the failure was/is coming from I tried:

gpg --recv-keys EA0A77BF9E115615FC3BD8BC7653B940E494FE87

with the same error as above (not surprising). I've even tried it with a couple of other keyservers. I'm new-ish to Arch and I've never seen this before so I started looking through old forum posts, what I could find in the wiki, various other sites, etc. and tried a multitude of things with no success. My version of gpg is

[~]$ gpg --version
gpg (GnuPG) 2.2.21
libgcrypt 1.8.6
Copyright (C) 2020 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <https://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.
Home: /home/m/.gnupg
Supported algorithms:
Pubkey: RSA, ELG, DSA, ECDH, ECDSA, EDDSA
Cipher: IDEA, 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH,
        CAMELLIA128, CAMELLIA192, CAMELLIA256
Hash: SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224
Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2

fwiw, I tried a

pacman-key --refresh-keys

which, as I understand, doesn't need to be done by the user, but I was curious due to other issues I had seen people bringing up online. That result was

==> ERROR: A specified local key could not be updated from a keyserver

I'm a little in over my head at this point because I've exhausted what I've found, so far, online. More than happy to procure more details for anybody.

---

...mostly ignorant

yochananmarqos

Member

Registered: 2020-02-05

Posts: 222

Re: gpg: keyserver search failed: General error

You're not the only one who had trouble with the default key server today.

Try another keyserver like pgp.mit.edu:

gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys XXXXXXXX