Follow up from key signing
Hi WLUG and BLU, I have signed all of the keys I have access to. If you haven't received an email from me, it's because either a) I can't get your key, or b) the email with your signed key was lost. Please email me directly if you're expecting a signed key from me. A few people expressed interest in the suite of tools I'm using to make signing easier, and also some visualization tools I'm playing with. They're all based on Debian's pgp-tools which can be called keysigning-party on your distribution. Hands down, the most useful tool is CA Fire and Forget or caff. It's in most distributions, and if it's not in your distro (or you're on a Mac) it's pretty easy to build. Just checkout it out from svn://svn.debian.org/svn/pgp-tools/trunk, and do a make all && make install clean Now that you have caff installed on your machine, it's time for some tweaks. Go ahead and run caff by typing caff at the command prompt. This will setup the folders and files you need that we'll be tweaking. 1) I *highly* suggest making a symlink from ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf -> ~/.caff/gnupghome/ via ln -s ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf ~/.caff/gnupghome This will have caff use your preferences in gpg.conf and it makes it easier to configure / use the way you want to. 2) edit ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf and set your default key, default keyserver (most of them sync with each other so it's not a big deal, but I prefer pool.sks-keyservers.net since it handles subkeys very well.) Also to note, keys can prefer certain servers so don't worry if gpg is asking a few different servers where things are. Also, if you haven't already, set your preferences for algorithms, hashes, and compression. *NOTE* this only applies to making new keys. You should still set the proper preferences on your key via gpg --edit-key <KEYID>. Lastly, I like to add ask-cert-level so gpg (and therefore caff) ask me what certification level to give to each signature 3) edit your ~/.caffrc file to customize your name, email address, and email template / procedure for signing keys. Caff looks for 16 digit keyids, not 8 so punch in the last 16 of your fingerprint for you key. Also, I like to bcc myself on the emails in case a message gets bounced so I can resend it easily via Thunderbird 4) Once those are edited and saved, you're all set! Grab your trusted list, and feed caff one or more keyids to handle via caff <KEYID> <KEYID> <KEYID...> Don't forget to verify the fingerprint caff / gpg show you with your trusted list. I'm attaching my gpg.conf and .caffrc files for those of you who are interested. I should probably put this up as a wiki / blog post at some point in time to I can go back and update / clarify it. Also, check out: sig2dot (included in pgp-tools / keysigning-party) which is a visualizer for the Web of Trust http://pgp.cs.uu.nl/ for PGP trust paths Cheers!
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Eric Martin