July 14th, 2008gpg - why do I keep waiting for lock?
On the server here I perform a number of offsite backups to gmail, they get triggered once a month. However, I am not comfortable with submitting my private data to a third party especially when the third party in question makes its money from collection and making searchable data. So to get over that I encrypted it using standard PGP principles using the open source alternative GPG.
All was going well until one month I woke up to a whole number of failed offsite backups all telling me that my trust database was corrupt. No problem as this seems to happen now and then and by simply deleting the trust database held at ~/.gnupg/trustdb.gpg should sort it out.
It did, but now it was stalling while it was “waiting for lock”:
gpg: waiting for lock (hold by 1407 - probably dead) ...
After a bit of playing about I soon worked out that gpg had left lock file laying around in the ~/.gnugp/ directory. I deleted the lock file (the one with the extension .lock gave it away) and now all fine again.
