We need --keyserver in gpg for just one reason: backward compatibility.

thanks for fixing that error message, @werner. As @Valodim points out in discusson about hagrid, a gpg.conf keyserver option (deprecated according to the documentation) overrides the dirmngr.conf keyserver option (not deprecated according to the documentation.

I doubt that we are going to implement this.

Thanks

I removed this specialized error message. Thanks for reporting.

This is particularly bad for users who have manually specified a given keyserver in dirmngr.conf, because even a transient failure in that keyserver will prevent them from any future keyserver requests until dirmngr decides that the "death" has worn off.

HTTP/1.1 spec, RFC 7230, Section 5.4, paragraph 2:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7230#section-5.4

Please be so kind and point me to the specs stating that you should put the IP address into Host:

It's up to GPG to send the Host header that shows the user's intent.

So in short you want:

1. Allow to specify a keyserver by IP without any DNS lookups.
2. When connecting via IP use the IP address for Host:.

There is a solution for it:

So, the keyserver operator had thrown in a hockeypuck server in the pool, causing this.. While the keyserver remains in the exclude list until confirmation it has been resolved, that explains the behavior and it has been made clear that separate software needs to use different names in the future.

@kristianf we talked about this on Saturday evening. Would you be so kind and have a quick look at the problem with the hu server?

Hi Werner and thanks for looking into this.

According to sks-keyservers.net both servers you mention run the very same software. Thus I would like to understand why you think they require the use of a legacy option.

It actually tries several servers but we need to set a limit because we need to cope with longer timeouts. Do you suggest to toggle between v4 and v6 addresses? That is if a v6 address fails, first try the next v4 address and it that fails, another v6 address, etc.

The problem is that the keyserver network is abused as free and
permanent data storage. We can't do much about it without larger
changes on the search capabilities of the keyservers. For more
information see the archives of the sks-devel list starting in July.

Ok. I was not aware that HKPS should already have the highest quality.

hkps pool really should be the most responsive, and it already requires clustered only servers for a couple of weeks to try to increase the responsiveness. Experience has shown that any keyserver with less than 3 nodes in a cluster should not be used towards end-users. But do you have any more debugging output as to the problem at hand?

We assume that this has meanwhile been fixed.

@elonsatoshi: Were you able to check this with 2.2.9 which has a fix for the resolver?

You know... I think connman and DNS have something to do with this. Connman does some weird DNS thing. And it auto-generates /etc/resolv.conf to use localhost as the DNS server.

Well, I'm able to reproduce this issue on Parabola. I was also get a different error when I turn off my vpn: `server indicated a failure```, but now I get the dns error again.

elonsatoshi@tyger ~> gpg -vvv --debug-level guru --search elonsatoshi@riseup.net
gpg: using character set 'utf-8'
gpg: enabled debug flags: packet mpi crypto filter iobuf memory cache memstat trust hashing ipc clock lookup extprog
gpg: DBG: [not enabled in the source] start
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- # Home: /home/elonsatoshi/.gnupg
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- # Config: [none]
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- OK Dirmngr 2.1.23 at your service
gpg: DBG: connection to the dirmngr established
gpg: DBG: chan_3 -> GETINFO version
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- D 2.1.23
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- OK
gpg: DBG: chan_3 -> KEYSERVER --clear hkps://pgp.mit.edu/
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- OK
gpg: DBG: chan_3 -> KS_SEARCH -- elonsatoshi@riseup.net
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- ERR 167772876 Connection closed in DNS <Dirmngr>
gpg: error searching keyserver: Connection closed in DNS
gpg: keyserver search failed: Connection closed in DNS
gpg: DBG: chan_3 -> BYE
gpg: DBG: [not enabled in the source] stop
gpg: keydb: handles=0 locks=0 parse=0 get=0
gpg:        build=0 update=0 insert=0 delete=0
gpg:        reset=0 found=0 not=0 cache=0 not=0
gpg: kid_not_found_cache: count=0 peak=0 flushes=0
gpg: sig_cache: total=0 cached=0 good=0 bad=0
gpg: random usage: poolsize=600 mixed=0 polls=0/0 added=0/0
              outmix=0 getlvl1=0/0 getlvl2=0/0
gpg: rndjent stat: collector=0x0000000000000000 calls=0 bytes=0
gpg: secmem usage: 0/32768 bytes in 0 blocks
elonsatoshi@tyger ~> sudo rc-service openvpn stop
[sudo] password for elonsatoshi: 
 * WARNING: openvpn is already stopped
elonsatoshi@tyger ~> pidof openvpn
elonsatoshi@tyger ~> gpg -vvv --debug-level guru --search elonsatoshi@riseup.net
gpg: using character set 'utf-8'
gpg: enabled debug flags: packet mpi crypto filter iobuf memory cache memstat trust hashing ipc clock lookup extprog
gpg: DBG: [not enabled in the source] start
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- # Home: /home/elonsatoshi/.gnupg
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- # Config: [none]
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- OK Dirmngr 2.1.23 at your service
gpg: DBG: connection to the dirmngr established
gpg: DBG: chan_3 -> GETINFO version
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- D 2.1.23
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- OK
gpg: DBG: chan_3 -> KEYSERVER --clear hkps://pgp.mit.edu/
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- OK
gpg: DBG: chan_3 -> KS_SEARCH -- elonsatoshi@riseup.net
gpg: DBG: chan_3 <- ERR 167772876 Connection closed in DNS <Dirmngr>
gpg: error searching keyserver: Connection closed in DNS
gpg: keyserver search failed: Connection closed in DNS
gpg: DBG: chan_3 -> BYE
gpg: DBG: [not enabled in the source] stop
gpg: keydb: handles=0 locks=0 parse=0 get=0
gpg:        build=0 update=0 insert=0 delete=0
gpg:        reset=0 found=0 not=0 cache=0 not=0
gpg: kid_not_found_cache: count=0 peak=0 flushes=0
gpg: sig_cache: total=0 cached=0 good=0 bad=0
gpg: random usage: poolsize=600 mixed=0 polls=0/0 added=0/0
              outmix=0 getlvl1=0/0 getlvl2=0/0
gpg: rndjent stat: collector=0x0000000000000000 calls=0 bytes=0
gpg: secmem usage: 0/32768 bytes in 0 blocks

Any update on this?

I was able to reproduce it again. Maybe this bug depends on which keyserver in
the pool answers. The error is the same for Tor and non-Tor connections.

I don't know why, it is not repdroducible anymore.