[Freeipa-users] Host aliases in freeipa

Roderick Johnstone rmj at ast.cam.ac.uk
Mon Mar 2 12:29:17 UTC 2015


On 27/02/15 20:04, Simo Sorce wrote:
> On Fri, 2015-02-27 at 18:59 +0000, Roderick Johnstone wrote:
>> On 27/02/15 18:33, Simo Sorce wrote:
>>> On Fri, 2015-02-27 at 18:19 +0000, Roderick Johnstone wrote:
>>>> Hi
>>>>
>>>> I'm trying to migrate of my NIS databases to freeipa and have got to the
>>>> hosts database.
>>>>
>>>> In NIS a typical entry is:
>>>> ipaddress canonical_name [aliases...]
>>>>
>>>> but I don't see how to enter the ipaddress or aliases using the ipa
>>>> host-* commands. Is that possible?
>>>>
>>>> Maybe this is supposed to be done with the ipa dns commands, but I don't
>>>> want freeipa to control the dns as we have an existing external dns
>>>> infrastructure to fit into.
>>>>
>>>> How should I configure freeipa to do host lookups for aliases like NIS does?
>>>
>>> While NIS supports hosts maps, FreeIPA strongly encourages the use of
>>> DNS, as such we do not have direct means of providing or querying hosts
>>> maps.
>>>
>>> Simo.
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> ok so I have to see how we can run the freeipa servers as dns servers
>> alongside the corporate servers for our domain.
>>
>> I'm not sure how to proceed since I've no idea what the issues could be.
>> Can you give me any hints or point to any docs?
>
> Is the problem that you cannot add entries to the corporate DNS server ?
>
> It is recommended to have a delegation or at least forwarding between
> name servers to avoid headaches.
>
> Simo.
>

Simo

Thanks for your response. We do have delegated access to update to the 
DNS for our domain and also run a couple of name servers ourselves.

The problem is really my ignorance of what any issues might be with 
having ipa manage more name servers in our domain which contains many 
hosts that will not ipa managed.

We already have a DNS infrastructure and I have seen the "Benefits of 
integrated DNS" section at http://www.freeipa.org/page/DNS. With regard 
to each bullet point number, my comments and queries are:

1) Our clients will have static addresses so this doesn't seem relevant 
in our case.

2) In my current testing setup we don't have SRV records because DNS is 
not managed by ipa and ipa seems to work ok.

I guess we will need to add SRV records to our DNS manually when we 
bring on line some ipa server replicas, so there could be a win here 
although I wouldn't anticipate the replicas changing much, so maybe this 
is a one-off manual setup without ipa managing DNS. Did I understand 
this correctly?

3) We do not have any AD to trust, at least for the forseeable future so 
this does not seem relevant in our sitution.

4) I'm not sure about this one. Things seem to work at the moment. Is 
this again about managing the records more easily when we bring on line 
replica servers?

Thanks for any clarification or pointers to docs or discussion that you 
can offer.

Roderick




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