pkspxy - Public Key Server Proxy
--------------------------------

This package implements a caching proxy to be used between any
program which speaks the HKP protocol for PGP public key exchange,
and any HKP-capable key server (this will probably be pks).

It may be distributed under the GNU General Public License, see the
file COPYING which came with the program.

Please send comments, remarks, and improvements to Thomas Roessler
<roessler@guug.de>.


Modules
-------

hkp/	This directory contains some routines to generate and parse
	certain HKP queries.  This code is shared by the pkspxyc
	client and the pkspxy server.

client/	This directory contains a "smart client" for pkspxy.  For
        every query, it stores a time stamp.  When asking the proxy,
	this time stamp is transmitted as part of the query.  The
	server will only respond when it has data which are more
	recent than the time stamp transmitted by the client, thus
	avoiding unnecessary key handling.

common/ This directory contains some small portability helpers, so
	we can use ndbm or db, and fcntl or flock.

server/	This directory contains the actual proxy server.  It'll
  	cache query results in files, one file per result.  These
	files are put into a multi-level directory structure.  Per
	default, this structure is located under /var/spool/pkspxy.
	You can adjust this location using the spool_dir
	configuration option.

	The server can operate in two modes, off-line and on-line.
	In off-line mode, it'll serve requests from the cache and
	update cache files the next time it's on-line.  In on-line
	mode, the server will immediately try to update cache files
	which are older than a certain interval of time.  (The
	default is 3600 seconds, you may wish to increase this to be
	in the region of several hours or even days.  The
	configuration option is "recheck".)

	To put the server into on-line mode, send it a SIGUSR1.  To
	put it into off-line mode, use SIGUSR2.

samples/ This directory contains sample code for various scripts you
	may wish to use with pkspxy.  This includes scripts to start
	pkspxy at boot time, and an sh wrapper script which queries
	key servers and adds keys to your public key ring.

For more documentation, read the PROBLEMS file, the source, and the
manual pages distributed with this package.

$Id: README,v 1.2 1999/08/24 21:32:25 roessler Exp $