[Freeipa-users] Promote CA-less replica

[Martin Babinsky]

On 10/19/2016 11:35 AM, James Harrison wrote:

Hi James,

> Hi,
> Were using FreeIPA on Ubuntu Xenial. We lost the Master server.
>
> I have some questions:
> 1. Do DNS replicate among other replicas is we change/add DNS records?
> If not can this behaviour be changed?
IPA-intergrated DNS stores records in the replicated LDAP subtree so any 
added/removed DNS record will replicate to other IPA DNS servers.

> 2. How do we promote a replica to become a master? We have not
> configured our servers to become a CA. Our CA is Comodo and we have
> configured FreeIPA to use a certificate, key and interim certificates
> from Comodo. using the options:
>
> --http_pkcs12=....
> --http_pin=....
> --dirsrv_pkcs12=...
> --dirsrv_pin=....
>
> Hope someone can help. Quite urgent.
>
The terms FreeIPA master/replica are quite arbitrary as all replicas are 
equal peers and can be considered masters. The only notion of 'master' 
is when you use a Dogtag CA (then one of the CA replicas is designated a 
renewal master and does renew certificates in the topology and one is 
CRL master generating certificate revocation lists) and/or DNSSec (then 
one of DNS replica is designated a key master generating zone signing 
keys and other DNS replicas pull these keys).

As you are using CA-less replicas then there should be no loss in the 
fact that the one designated 'master' is down (unless it was e.g. the 
only DNS server). As long as the others have valid CA and server certs 
they should be working just fine.

You can just install a new replica in place of the master by generating 
replica file on another replicaa nd supplying the required certificates 
through options.

> Regards,
> James Harrison
>
>


-- 
Martin^3 Babinsky