Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 1475541
Certificate renewal scripts can crash and leave FreeIPA in a broken state
Last modified: 2017-12-12 05:19:44 EST
Rob Crittenden kindly helped me diagnose and fix a serious problem on my FreeIPA server today. tomcat had suddenly started failing to authenticate when trying to access the LDAP server (389). Rob figured out (if I understand correctly) that it was down to a TLS certificate mismatch: the server certificate Tomcat was expecting 389 to be using was not the same as the server certificate it was *actually* using. Diagnosing this was not at all straightforward, and fixing it involved some fairly advanced (for a non-LDAP-specialist) ldapmodify stuff that again I probably couldn't have worked out for myself. We think this was ultimately caused by a problem with the certmonger-based automatic certificate renewal stuff. It seems that an SELinux denial caused the renew_ca_cert and stop_pkicad scripts (both part of FreeIPA) not to be able to stop the pki-tomcatd service, and this failure caused renew_ca_cert to crash (several times, in fact). I think this resulted in the inconsistent state (the renewal process got as far as issuing the new cert and configuring 389 to use it, but didn't manage to configure tomcat to expect it). Of course, we should fix the SELinux policy so the scripts *aren't* preventing from stopping the service, and I've filed a bug for that: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1475528 . But I also thought I should file this bug to see if the renewal process can be made safer - done more atomically, so if it fails things are correctly rolled back and FreeIPA left in a consistent state (and perhaps some kind of understandable alert generated and logged / sent to the admin / whatever). And certainly it shouldn't cause renew_ca_cert to just straight up *crash*, as it does. I'll attaching the full extract of journal messages from the renewal.
Created attachment 1305048 [details] journal extract
Upstream ticket: https://pagure.io/freeipa/issue/7091
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