January 01, 2003
Importing PGP keys
If you want to use one of my PGP keys you'll need to import them into your local keyring. This is pretty easy to do.
The first thing you need to do is save a copy of my public key to your local machine. I have three different versions of the same key, one each from PGP, PGP6 and GnuPG. Pick one and save it to your local drive. If you're not sure, use the PGP one.
- Get either PGP or GnuGP properly installed first.
- This means load the software
- Generate your own key
- Setup your own keyring(s)
- Save one of my keys to your local drive
- If you're doing it from the command line here are the steps:
- Using PGP
- execute the command pgp -ka keyfile and change keyfile to the name of my saved key.
This will report either it added my key or that no new keys were found (because you'd already imported sometime before!)
- execute the command pgp -ka keyfile and change keyfile to the name of my saved key.
- Using GnuPG
- run the command gpg --import keyfile and change keyfile to the name of my saved key.
gpg will likewise report the number of keys processed and the number it added to your keyring. It may burp an error about invalid subkeys if the key has elements it doesn't understand (like mine). This isn't a problem as those subkeys will just be ignored.
- run the command gpg --import keyfile and change keyfile to the name of my saved key.
- Using PGP
