FreeIPA is an integrated user, host and service identity management solution combining 389 Directory Server (LDAP), MIT Kerberos, a BIND DNS server and the Dogtag Certificate Authority service with a simple but powerful Web GUI and an extensive command line interface for easy administration. It claims to become something like an Active Directory for Linux and Unix environments and is heavily pushed by Red Hat, which also integrates it as IPA server in their Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. A nice overview can be found in this presentation.
After having the pleasure of playing around with the Red Hat IPA server on RHEL and CentOS for the past few weeks, I also wanted to use this excellent identity management platform with my Gentoo Linux boxes. Some years ago, a bug report was opened in the Gentoo bugzilla (#297665), to coordinate the inclusion of FreeIPA in Gentoo. Andreis Vinogradovs, another Gentoo user, then started an effort, to write some of the necessary ebuilds for building FreeIPA, however they are still far from complete and therefore haven’t made it into the official Gentoo repository yet. This means that FreeIPA is unfortunately still not fully available for Gentoo.
Based on Andreis’ work, I started another effort, to update and polish the FreeIPA ebuild and its dependencies, so that they can be used on a Gentoo Linux box. The server part has dozens of dependencies not yet officially integrated in Gentoo, and the available ebuilds are mostly outdated, so I haven’t put too much effort yet into integrating the server parts on Gentoo. Especially the entire PKI infrastructure is still missing.
However, I succeeded to configure a Gentoo box as full-featured FreeIPA client, including OpenRC support for `authconfig` and `ipa-client-install`. I also found and reported some bugs in official Gentoo ebuilds (#445394, #445478), where you have to work-around in case you try out the setup yourself.
Of course you are curious now, where you can find the ebuilds. Because the work on them and especially the testing is still ongoing, I created a repository on Github so that everybody who is interested can have a look at ebuilds and provide constructive feedback in terms of pull requests.
I’m especially looking for people who would like to try the FreeIPA client with a Gentoo systemd or/and a hardened SELinux system.
How can you test the FreeIPA client on your Gentoo box?
You have to begin with setting up a (Free)IPA server, which is currently only possible on a Red Hat-based distribution. The easiest way is to setup a CentOS 6 VM, then run:
[root@centos6 ~]# yum install ipa-server
[root@centos6 ~]# ipa-server-install
More information can be found in the upstream installation guide.
Then add the ‘freeipa-overlay’ to the layman configuration of your Gentoo client. How you do this is described here.
ATTENTION: This guide is meant to be for experimental testing only. Don’t do this on your workstation if you are not familiar with FreeIPA and its technologies. I don’t take any responsibility if you blow up your machine. You have been warned!
Finally you are ready to emerge FreeIPA. Make sure tho have a look at the various
USE flags. They don’t have too much influence on build-time functionality but
on run-time dependencies. So you can slim down your installation in case you
already know, that you don’t need another DNS server or winbind support for
example. Set the ‘minimal’ USE flag for only building the IPA client
(Update 07.12.2012: This USE flag was replaces with ‘server’, so the client will be installed by default):
gentoo ~ # emerge -av freeipa
Some keyword unmasking may be required when you run a stable Gentoo installation.
Before you can start your IPA client installation, you have to make sure, that an empty NSS certificate database exists. This is expected to be under /etc/pki/nssdb. Gentoo however puts all the SSL stuff under /etc/ssl. I solved this by creating a symlink:
gentoo ~ # ln -s ssl /etc/pki
gentoo ~ # certutil -N -d /etc/pki/nssdb
Eventually the IPA client can be configured. E.g.:
gentoo ~ # ipa-client-install --mkhomedir --no-dns-sshfp
Discovery was successful!
Hostname: gentoo.example.com
Realm: EXAMPLE.COM
DNS Domain: example.com
IPA Server: centos6.example.com
BaseDN: dc=example,dc=com
Continue to configure the system with these values? [no]: yes
User authorized to enroll computers: admin
Synchronizing time with KDC...
Password for admin@EXAMPLE.COM:
Enrolled in IPA realm EXAMPLE.COM
Created /etc/ipa/default.conf
Domain example.com is already configured in existing SSSD config, creating a new one.
The old /etc/sssd/sssd.conf is backed up and will be restored during uninstall.
Configured /etc/sssd/sssd.conf
Configured /etc/krb5.conf for IPA realm EXAMPLE.COM
SSSD enabled
Configured /etc/openldap/ldap.conf
NTP enabled
Configured /etc/ssh/ssh_config
Warning: Installed OpenSSH server does not support dynamically loading
authorized user keys. Public key authentication of IPA users
will not be available.
Configured /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Client configuration complete.
That’s it! Your system is now able to use user accounts created on the IPA server. Check it with:
gentoo ~ # id admin
uid=155960000(admin) gid=155960000(admins) groups=155960000(admins)
As you can see in the generated /etc/pam.d/system-auth, pam_unix will be checked before pam_sssd. This means your local user accounts still have precedence towards the IPA accounts.
Happy testing… 🙂