Bug 461523

Adding -2 to the certutil -S will not fix the original problem, which is that I was running ipa-server-install as root from an NFS mount - for some reason certutil attempts to write to $PWD, which fails with EACCES (13).

In order to automate CA cert creation with the -2 argument, you have to provide 3 additional args on stdin:
#> certutil -S -n "CA certificate" -s "cn=CAcert" -x -t "CT,," -m 1000 -v 120 -d $secdir \
   -z $secdir/noise.txt -f $secdir/pwdfile.txt -2
Is this a CA certificate [y/N]? y
Enter the path length constraint, enter to skip [<0 for unlimited path]:
Is this a critical extension [y/N]? y

so
( echo y; echo; echo y ) | certutil -S ..... -2

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Created attachment 388667 [details]
handle

The root cause of this problem is that certutil wants to write a file to the cwd when generating a key so we need to be some place writable.

So don't assume that cwd exists or is writable. I had worked on this previously so that we change to a known writable directory when issuing server certs. Enhance that so we change to the NSS db dir when issuing the self-signed CA. 

Also handle the case where cwd is an invalid directory. I tested this with:

term 1: mkdir foo
        cd foo

term 2: rmdir foo

term 1: ipa-server-install ...

Probably not a major issue but not hard to more carefully handle it either. The installation will still fail but at least we have a good message when it does.

I tested the non-writable directory by creating a small filesystem:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/partition bs=65535 count=10
# mke2fs /root/partition (say yes that it is isn't a block system)
# mount -o ro,loop /root/partition /mnt
# cd /mnt
# ipa-server-install

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Approximately 30 (thirty) days from now Fedora will stop maintaining
and issuing updates for Fedora 11.  It is Fedora's policy to close all
bug reports from releases that are no longer maintained.  At that time
this bug will be closed as WONTFIX if it remains open with a Fedora 
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plan to fix it in a currently maintained version, simply change the 'version' 
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we may not be able to fix it before Fedora 11 is end of life.  If you 
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bug to the applicable version.  If you are unable to change the version, 
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Fedora 11 changed to end-of-life (EOL) status on 2010-06-25. Fedora 11 is 
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In an unrelated change IPA now tests to be sure that the cwd is sane. This should address this problem.

Package Maintainer: I see that you reopened this bug.  Unfortunately the 'version' is set to 11 and F11 is EOL.  Please change the 'version' to >11.

changing product to freeipa