[Freeipa-users] Need to replace cert for ipa servers

[Dmitri Pal]

On 03/13/2015 01:47 PM, Johnny Tan wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 5:56 PM, Dmitri Pal <dpal at redhat.com 
> <mailto:dpal at redhat.com>>wrote:
>
>     IPA does not use certs for communication between the instances. It
>     uses Kerberos. I am not sure the DoDaddy cert you added is even
>     used in some way by IPA.
>
>
> Dmitri or Rob:
>
> Could you explain what the various uses of the IPA certs are, then? 
> AFAICT, the IPA masters generate a certificate for each node in the 
> realm. Why does it do that? I thought it was for:
> - Webui/api (apache) communication over https.
> - LDAP binding/communication over 636 (TLS).

Rob would definitely know more but IPA mostly provides certs for the 
infra it serves and has a limited use of the certs by itself.
So here is where I know it is used:
- You can issue certs for hosts and services and installer used to 
create certs for host automatically though these certs are not used for 
anything and we decided not to create them automatically any more.
- You need to trust IPA in browser so that you can do a forms based 
authentication if you do not have a kerberos ticket.
- To issue certs we use Dogtag and Dogtag understands only cert based 
authentication so internally the communication between the managment 
framework and Dogtag uses SSL. This is actually why the host-del fails. 
The host had a cert issued by IPA CA so as part of the del operation it 
tries to revoke the cert but since you reconfigured the sustem to use be 
CA less it can't and fails.

The communication between the LDAP servers is Kerberos authenticated.

>
> But if the certs are not utilized for communication between the 
> instances (per statement above), what are they used for?
>
> I'm not hijacking the thread, I'm actually in the exact same position 
> as OP. I replaced the self-signed IPA/dogtag CA root with one that was 
> signed by our own CA and am now having problems with various cert 
> errors during client enrollment or any other similar activity (like 
> doing an 'ipa host-del' directly on an IPA master).

We have a special tool in Freeipa 4.2 to do this. The manual procedure 
is cumbersome and leads to issues like this.

>
> I can post those details in a separate thread, but before I go down 
> that path, I want to better understand what the purpose of the certs 
> are so I can deterine what's the best path forward for us.
>
> As I understand it from the docs, there are three primary ways to run 
> IPA with respect to a CA:
> - self-signed IPA CA, this is the default
> - signing the IPA CA root with an "external"/3rd-party CA
> - running "CA-less" and providing all certs with the 
> external/3rd-party CA (depending on what the use/purpose of the certs 
> are, this is increasingly becoming an attractive option but is likely 
> also tedious in its own right)
>

You are correct here.

> Thanks for any insight.
>
> On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 5:56 PM, Dmitri Pal <dpal at redhat.com 
> <mailto:dpal at redhat.com>> wrote:
>
>     On 03/04/2015 04:32 PM, sipazzo wrote:
>>     Good afternoon, we have a freeipa 3.0.42 installation running on
>>     redhead 6.6 with a mix of rhel 5, rhel6 and Solaris clients. It
>>     was originally configured with the built in dogtag certificate CA
>>     and then one of my co-workers added our GoDaddy certificate to
>>     the certificate bundle. My understanding is this cert is used for
>>     communication between the ipa servers as well as the clients are
>>     also configured to trust the GoDaddy certificate. We recently had
>>     to get a new GoDaddy cert so our old one is revoked. I need to
>>     figure out how to either replace the existing revoked cert with
>>     the new one or add the new one to the bundle and then remove the
>>     revoked certificate so as not to break anything.
>>
>>     Any help is appreciated. I am not strong with certificates so the
>>     more detail you can give the better.
>>     Thank you.
>>
>>
>     You say it was running with the self signed IPA CA and than
>     GoDaddy cert was added to the bundle. How was it added?
>     IPA does not use certs for communication between the instances. It
>     uses Kerberos. I am not sure the DoDaddy cert you added is even
>     used in some way by IPA.
>     It seems that your GoDaddy cert is an orthogonal trust so if you
>     replaced the main key pair then you just need to distribute your
>     new GoDaddy cert to the clients as you did on the first place.
>
>
>     -- 
>     Thank you,
>     Dmitri Pal
>
>     Sr. Engineering Manager IdM portfolio
>     Red Hat, Inc.
>
>
>     --
>     Manage your subscription for the Freeipa-users mailing list:
>     https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/freeipa-users
>     Go To http://freeipa.org for more info on the project
>
>
>
>


-- 
Thank you,
Dmitri Pal

Sr. Engineering Manager IdM portfolio
Red Hat, Inc.

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