Key servers are repositories of keys in public key systems, they are necessary infrastructure for the widespread and easy use of systems such as PGP and GnuPG. Normally KeyServers are publically accessible, allowing for querying, retrieval and long-term archiving of public keys.
(OpenPGP is the standard that GPG and PGP adhere to).
If you're new to GPG, and wondering what you're supposed to do with your newly created key, here are some key servers you can upload and receive keys to/from.
Use a command like
gpg --keyserver <some.key.server> ...
(In recent versions of GPG -- such as 1.2.1 or later -- the options file has been renamed to gpg.conf)
There are many lists of publically accessible key servers, but many of the are very out-of-date. At the time of writing 
http://keyserver.kjsl.com/jharris/keyserver.html was a good, current list.
Most OpenPGP keyservers are part of a global network that synchronises slowly. You can see the full synchronisation map here:
The only NZ based OpenPGP keyserver is at:
http://pgp.net.nz (info pages)http://pgp.net.nz:11371 (web interface)Other servers that synchronise with each other are:
http://www.au.pgp.net/pgpnet/ftp-key.htmlhttp://wwwkeys.pgp.net (this uses round-robin DNS)http://wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net (a subset of the above)http://www.pgpkeys.net (I think this is part of the above network...?)
RFC:2440, RFC:2440bis and http://www.nongnu.org/sks/) compatible keyservers advertised using RoundRobinDNS?. They are well synchronised and support advanced features such as photo uids.These servers (apparently?) don't synchronise with the above.
Part of CategoryCryptography
