moving gpg to another PC

[Nic Ferrier]

Nic Ferrier wrote:
> > I installed GPG on a linux machine some time ago, I've now moved my 
> > home stuff to another machine (I still have the old one). 
> > 
> > I want to move my GPG stuff to the new machine. 
> > 
> > I saw a message in March that suggested that I would just have to 
> > copy the .gnupg directory to the new machine, I've tried that but it 
> > doesn't seem to work. 
> > 
> > 
> > The problem is that the key ids change as soon as the directory is 
> > copied. This means that the new machine can't decrypt stuff sent with 
> > the private key created on the old machine. 
> > 
> > 
> > Can anybody help? 

"R. Bradley Tilley" <rtilley@vt.edu> replied:
> It's permissions 
> ============================ 
> .gnupg directory is	700 
> options file is 		664 
> pubring.gpg file is 	664 
> random_seed file is 	600 
> secring.gpg file is	600 
> trustdb file is		664 
>  
> Place the .gnupg directory into 
> the users home directory and 
> chown and chgrp to that user. 
> Be sure the permissions match 
> the ones above. 
> ============================ 
>  

No. It isn't permissions. I copied the dir with the correct
permissions and it still doesn't work. When one does:

  gpg --list-keys

on both machines the key ids are very clearly different.

Attempting to:

  gpg -d somefile-enrypted-by-old-key

on the new machine fails with the statement:

  gpg: decryption failed: secret key not available
  gpg: [don't know]: invalid packet (ctb=50)

whereas on the old machine it's fine.


Any more ideas?


Nic