Nijel's weblog | blog.cihar.com

Many times I needed "intelligent" way to grab key path from my key (and others I somehow trust for signing purposes) to other random key that gets to me.

Receiving keys for all signatures is quite expensive operation and you soon end with most of PGP keys on the world in your database. The best seems to fetch only needed keys. You can find path using PGP pathfinder & key statistics by Henk P. Penning. It's extremely useful site, where you can find many information about PGP keys.

So the logical step seems to be to write down script which will grab needed keys:

#!/bin/sh

if [ "$#" -lt 1 -o "$#" -gt 2 ] ; then
    echo usage `basename $0` ID [gpgparam]
    exit 1
fi

url=http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/henkp/henkp/pgp/pathfinder/mk_path.cgi

(
links -dump "$url?FROM=36E75604&TO=$1"
links -dump "$url?FROM=B3B2A12C&TO=$1"
links -dump "$url?FROM=65D0FD58&TO=$1"
) | grep -o '[0-9A-F]\{8\}'  | sort -u | xargs gpg --recv-keys --no-auto-check-trustdb $2

gpg --check-trustdb $2

And special bonus for Sylpheed-Claws users. Here is action to call above script:

ID=`gpg --verify %p /dev/null 2>&1 | \
grep "key ID" | tr -d "[:space:]" | \
tail -c8`;echo "==== Fetching $ID ===="; \
~/bin/gpg_get_path $ID --no-tty

For some time, I've been using free vserver hosting on pipni.cz for phpMyAdmin demos. It had always so much troubles, so I decided to move that to my own server. As I don't want to drop it completely as it might be useful for some testing, I placed there mirrors of arch.cihar.com and dl.cihar.com under names arch2.cihar.com and dl2.cihar.com under hope that they will be available at least sometimes.

But I was wrong. Server doesn't autostart anymore and after starting it survives around 1 day, so it is not usable at all. I know it is free service, however I thought they offer it as advertisement for more expensive services they offer. I doubt this way will attract anybody…