[Freeipa-users] Rebuilding the failing original IPA master

[Steven Jones]

Hi,

8><-----------

OK, details are important here. Terms like "blew up" and "bad schema"
leave me guessing exactly what you mean.

8><-----------

I dont know whast wrong either but everything I seem to try and setup goes badly with intermittant or total failures.  For instance a winsync agreement with the old server and AD wipes existing IPA users groups and doesnt put the new users in the ipausers group, no one has seen that behaviour it seems. Yet a clean 6.3 IPA master does put new users in the ipausers group and existing users retain their groups. 

8><------------

So if I understand it correctly you have a 2.1.3 -> 2.2.0 master that is
limping along and two freshly installed 2.2.0 masters and you'd like to
uninstall and re-install the server whose upgrade didn't go well.

8><-----------

Yes....from testing a clean 6.3 it seems to work for winsync at least fine.....rpm -q says 2.2.0-16

8><-----------

- remove the server that failed upgrading (ipa-replica-manage del
non-working.example.com)
- Follow the CLEANRUV docs at
http://directory.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Howto:CLEANRUV (starts about
midway down the page)
- ipa-server-install --uninstall on the decomissioned server
- prepare a new replica file
- ipa-replica-install

Note that selfsign is not supported in RHEL. You'll need to refer to the
Fedora docs on how to do that, see section 16.8.2 at
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/15/html/FreeIPA_Guide/promoting-replica.html

Unfortunately the docs are wrong. You want to use the NSS database in
/etc/httpd/alias and not the DS instance. The cacert.p12 comes from the
file you saved after the initial install. You saved that, right?

8><----------

Yes, it should be in our subversion system.

8><----------

If not, you can run this on the old master to re-create it:

# pk12util -o /tmp/cacert.p12 -d /etc/httpd/alias -n '$REALM IPA CA' -k
/etc/httpd/alias/pwdfile.txt

These are some instructions one of our engineers wrote up when he needed
to do this himself. You can probably skip step 1 as you already have a
couple of working replicas.

Tread carefully. If you lose your CA you won't have the ability to
create new replicas, issue server certs, do much of anything.

1) Install replica
# ipa-replica-install
2) Copy CA serial number setting from master to replica:
# scp /var/lib/ipa/ca_serialno new_ca.example.com:/var/lib/ipa/
3) On replica, set correct owner and permissions:
# chown root:apache /var/lib/ipa/ca_serialno
# chmod 550 /var/lib/ipa/ca_serialno
4) Restore SELinux context on serial file:
# restorecon /var/lib/ipa/ca_serialno
5) Copy CA certificate and pwdfile.txt from master to replica:
# scp /etc/httpd/alias/cacert.p12 /etc/httpd/alias/pwdfile.txt
new_ca.example.com:~/
7) On replica, import the CA certificate:
# pk12util -i ~/cacert.p12 -w ~/pwdfile.txt -d /etc/httpd/alias/ -k
/etc/httpd/alias/pwdfile.txt
8) The list of certificates in NSS database (including the one imported)
can be
listed with:

# certutil -L -d /etc/httpd/alias/

However, since pk12util import util is not capable of setting a correct
certificate nickname, the imported certificate will have a nickname like
""CN=$REALM Certificate Authority", which is not recognized by IPA
certificate
system.

The following procedure can be used set a correct nickname of the
certificate:

a) Export the certificate
# certutil -d /etc/httpd/alias/ -L -n 'CN=$REALM Certificate Authority' -a >
~/cacert.crt
b) Delete the old certificate (NSS database /etc/httpd/alias/ should be
backed
up before this step):
# certutil -d /etc/httpd/alias/ -D -n 'CN=$REALM Certificate Authority'
c) Import the certificate with correct nickname:
# certutil -A -n "$REALM IPA CA" -d /etc/httpd/alias/ -f
/etc/httpd/alias/pwdfile.txt -i /root/cacert.crt -a -t CTu,u,Cu

9) Enable certificate operations on IPA replica:
# echo "enable_ra=True" >> /etc/ipa/default.conf
10) Reload web server to pick up new configuration:
# service httpd reload