[Freeipa-users] Where should new clients register?

[Martin Kosek]

On 09/25/2013 05:32 PM, Bret Wortman wrote:
> Does it make a difference which replica (or master) a new client registers
> with? I've traditionally tried to match them up with the closest ones, but
> if it doesn't make any real difference, I'll just grab whoever answers
> first and be done with it.

It would matter if you would not use DNS autodiscovery as client use just the
provided list of IPA servers to communicate with.

However, if you use DNS autodiscovery, client (SSSD), will first use a (random)
IPA server from the list of autodiscovered servers via DNS SRV records. You can
verify in your sssd.conf:

# grep ipa_server /etc/sssd/sssd.conf
ipa_server = _srv_, vm-052.example.com

When no DNS SRV record is found, it should fall back to the replica it was
configured against.

Things would change when DNS sites RFE is implemented and you could focus
clients only to geographically close servers:

https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/2008

Thanks,
Martin