If you've never set up the database before, we ship a simple script to walk you through the process of fetching a keydump, importing it, and enabling the service: su - debian-sks -c /usr/share/sks/sks-db-setup If you want to connect your server to the global network of SKS keyservers (you probably do if you're running this daemon publicly), you should subscribe to the SKS mailing list (https://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/sks-devel/) and ask for gossip partners. Include the partners in /etc/sks/membership; running daemons will notice automatically when that file changes. ----- What does the script do? It tries to fetch a full keydump from: https://pgp.key-server.io/sks-dump/ or from the keydump location you pass to it -- if this one's not working for you, feel free to ask on the SKS mailing list. It puts the dumps in /var/lib/sks/dump, owned by the debian-sks user, and then (also as that user) runs /usr/lib/sks/sks_build.sh to import them. ---- But the daemons are still not running, even if the db is set up. Running the daemons under systemd is recommended. To enable them (so that they will start at every boot): systemctl enable sks.service To start them up: systemctl start sks.service If you're using the System V init system, you'll need to enable the daemons by editing /etc/default/sks, and start and stop them using the invoke-rc.d or service commands. ----- For recommended modes of public operation, please see: https://github.com/SKS-Keyserver/sks-keyserver/wiki/Peering -- Christoph Martin , Wed, 16 Sep 2020 18:03:03 +0200