Won't mirror without dists/sarge/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz signature in Release

["A.E.Lawrence" <A.E.Lawrence@lboro.ac.uk>]

For the last two weeks or so, I have trouble in using debmirror on the
sarge section of the amd.debian.net mirrors. The same thing has happened
on etch now and again, but that seems just to be a temporary problem of
mirrors updating. The sarge problem however seems to be ongoing, perhaps
because it is static. But then I would not expect the signature to have
changed in that case.

deb mirror complains about a missing signature, despite the use of the
"--ignore-release-gpg" and the fact that it successfuly handles the etch
 section.

In passing
https://alioth.debian.org/docman/view.php/30192/21/debian-amd64-howto.html
needs updating because it gives instructions to run "apt-key"

"wget http://amd64.debian.net/archive.key
apt-key add archive.key"

but there is no "apt-key" command as far as I can tell. It does seem to
be hard to locate the relevant documentation... I am looking through a
large number of documents just now: I know it is there somewhere. I have
used it before. But I don't remember where I found it. I do have
/etc/apt/archive.key, but that is for an i386 archive, [the partial
mirror is on an i386 box].

Here is the tail of the debmirror failure message:-

gpg: Signature made Sat Dec 17 10:46:27 2005 GMT using DSA key ID 4F368D5D
gpg: Can't check signature: public key not found
Release signature does not verify.
Get Packages and Sources files and other miscellany.
Won't mirror without dists/sarge/main/binary-amd64/Packages.gz signature
in Release at /usr/bin/debmirror line 1187.

I think that the first two gpg lines are spurious because

1) --ignore-release-gpg was used on the debmirror command line;

2) The same
    gpg: Signature made Sat Dec 17 10:46:27 2005 GMT using DSA key ID
  4F368D5D
    gpg: Can't check signature: public key not found
messages appear on a successful update of the etch section.

Can someone remind me where to find the documentation on the equivalent
of apt-key?

Is the problem my end, or is there some inconsistency in the sarge part
of amd.debian.net archives?

ael

-- 
Dr A E Lawrence