[Freeipa-devel] Streamline client use cases

[Simo Sorce]

On Tue, 2011-05-17 at 13:56 -0400, Adam Young wrote:
> There are a wide variety of install scenarios, so we don't get too 
> specific on some scenarios.  One that is pretty common in the test and 
> acceptance phase that might not be a real issue in a live deployment 
> deals with DHCP values for nameservers.  For example, when coding on my 
> laptop, the DHCP server provides a bogus value for the nameserver.  
> Additionally, we have a Lab setup at our office that is managed by 
> another team, and it certainly won't provide the nameserver value for a 
> development IPA server.

I am not sure how this can be fixed, have a cron job that test the
config is right ?

> What I'd like to see is a workflow based approach to the ipa-client 
> setup that does basic configuration and  troubleshooting.
> 
> If the user runs ipa-client,  attempt autodiscovery.  If autodiscovery 
> fails, the first thing we should do is get the name or IP address of the 
> nameserver, and then retry autodiscovery.  If it fails again, we can 
> potentially test for firewall ports etc.  For example, if we attempt to 
> do an xmlrpc to the IPA server, get back a "Negotiate" response, and yet 
> we can't talk to the KDC, it is likely a firewall issue.   These are 
> probably the most common issues on client install.

This could be valuable beyond mere development so it would be anice to
have.

> Second deals with adding users.  We have a catch 22 regarding 
> automount.  Ideally, an NFS server will contain the automounted home 
> directories for the users.  For a small organization, automounted /home  
> in its entirety is probably fine.  However, far more common is to 
> autmount the separate directories for each user using a matching rule.  
> In this case, there is no easy way to create the users home directory on 
> demand.  I'm not sure that there is a single 'right' solution, but one 
> possible approach is to provide a "call this script after user creation' 
> hook.

We have thought about this earlier, the problem is that the UI runs as
the apache user, so running a script is not going to be really helpful
to run a script straight from the web server.

And having a setuid binary to run scripts makes me a little nervous.

In general we have considered the admin duty to create appropriate
storage resources for user's home directories.

The thinking was that they can create their own scripts that use the
XML-RPC interface to deal with the IPA part and whatever they like to
deal with any other operation they need to do when enrolling new users/

> I can open tickets for these, but I'd like to vet the concepts first.  
> Perhaps there is something I'm missing in both cases.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York