[Freeipa-users] version compatibility between server and client

[Martin Kosek]

On 02/26/2016 05:23 PM, Rakesh Rajasekharan wrote:
> Hi!,
> 
> I had successfully set up ipa in our qa environment, but since we are
> running cenots 6, i just got 3.0.25 version of IPA.
> 
> I wanted to try out the latest 4.x version, for server by using a centos 7
> OS. But have few questions regarding that
> 
> Will there be compatibility issues, if I use a server at 4.x and clients at
> 3.0.25

Please see
http://www.freeipa.org/page/Client#Compatibility
There are plans for FreeIPA 4.4 to improve the "ipa" tool/API compatibility too.

> Another question is,
>>From the documentation, I see that theres an option to manually configure a
> client where in we do not have to install freeipa-client using
> ipa-client-install
> 
> https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/FreeIPA_Guide/linux-manual.html

Please note that this is a quite old documentation, see here for other options:
http://www.freeipa.org/page/Upstream_User_Guide

> So that way , I can install the latest version of freeipa server and make
> my clients also be able to use the latest verison without actually
> installing it.
> 
> But, are there any issues with this approach, and how does it differ from
> doing a ipa-client-install on the client machine.

I can hardly imagine when manually configuring a FreeIPA client would be a good
idea. In vast majority of cases, ipa-client-install is what you want, to
configure a client against newer or older FreeIPA server version.

Martin