[Freeipa-devel] Thoughts on client configuration

[Rob Crittenden]

I've got all the pieces together to create a host principal and keytab 
when a machine joins an IPA realm and am thinking about how I'm going to 
tie it altogether.

My plan revolves around enhancing ipa-client-install to call ipa-join 
and ipa-rmkeytab (for uninstall). The question then becomes, is the 
client configuration dependent upon successful machine join?

We have a bit of a chicken and egg problem right now with join in terms 
of validating argument inputs. Joining a machine can happen one of two 
ways, using kerberos credentials (an admin) or using a one-time password 
(OTP).

The OTP method is easy enough, we can call that really early in the 
client configuration process. If it fails (wrong password, host not 
created, whatever) we can simply quit and not configure the client at all.

With the admin method we have to first configure the machine, then get 
the credentials, then try to do the join. It could easily fail here for 
a number of reasons. Do we roll back the configuration upon failure?

I'm thinking the answer should be yes, otherwise some machines will have 
host service principals and some won't making a support nightmare. But 
should we have a --force option to let the client be configured anyway, 
in sort of a degraded mode? Or a --no-keytab option to be more explicit? 
Or both?

I'm all for flexibility, just not sure what the implications of this are 
other than support headaches like "I can log into machine A but not 
machine B, why not?" Well, you're missing the host keytab for some reason...

rob
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3245 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/freeipa-devel/attachments/20091109/5e1f8a41/attachment.bin>