[Freeipa-devel] [PATCHES 0015-0017] consolidation of various Kerberos auth methods in FreeIPA code

[Simo Sorce]

On Mon, 2015-03-16 at 13:30 +0100, Martin Babinsky wrote:
> On 03/16/2015 12:15 PM, Martin Kosek wrote:
> > On 03/13/2015 05:37 PM, Martin Babinsky wrote:
> >> Attaching the next iteration of patches.
> >>
> >> I have tried my best to reword the ipa-client-install man page bit about the
> >> new option. Any suggestions to further improve it are welcome.
> >>
> >> I have also slightly modified the 'kinit_keytab' function so that in Kerberos
> >> errors are reported for each attempt and the text of the last error is retained
> >> when finally raising exception.
> >
> > The approach looks very good. I think that my only concern with this patch is
> > this part:
> >
> > +            ccache.init_creds_keytab(keytab=ktab, principal=princ)
> > ...
> > +        except krbV.Krb5Error as e:
> > +            last_exc = str(e)
> > +            root_logger.debug("Attempt %d/%d: failed: %s"
> > +                              % (attempt, attempts, last_exc))
> > +            time.sleep(1)
> > +
> > +    root_logger.debug("Maximum number of attempts (%d) reached"
> > +                      % attempts)
> > +    raise StandardError("Error initializing principal %s: %s"
> > +                        % (principal, last_exc))
> >
> > The problem here is that this function will raise the super-generic
> > StandardError instead of the proper with all the context and information about
> > the error that the caller can then process.
> >
> > I think that
> >
> >      except krbV.Krb5Error as e:
> >          if attempt == max_attempts:
> >              log something
> >              raise
> >
> > would be better.
> >
> 
> Yes that seems reasonable. I'm just thinking whether we should re-raise 
> Krb5Error or raise ipalib.errors.KerberosError? the latter options makes 
> more sense to me as we would not have to additionally import Krb5Error 
> everywhere and it would also make the resulting errors more consistent.
> 
> I am thinking about someting like this:
> 
>      except krbV.Krb5Error as e:
>         if attempt == attempts:
>             # log that we have reaches maximum number of attempts
>             raise KerberosError(minor=str(e))
> 
> What do you think?

Are you retrying on any error ?
Please do *not* do that, if you retry many times on an error that
indicates the password is wrong you may end up locking an administrative
account. If you want to retry you should do it only for very specific
timeout errors.

Simo.


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