Previous: Principal conversion issues, Up: Kerberos 4 issues [Contents]
If you want to convert an existing version 4 database, the principal conversion issue arises too.
If you decide to convert your database once and for all, you will only have to do this conversion once. It is also possible to run a version 5 KDC as a slave to a version 4 KDC. In this case this conversion will happen every time the database is propagated. When doing this conversion, there are a few things to look out for. If you have stale entries in the database, these entries will not be converted. This might be because these principals are not used anymore, or it might be just because the principal couldn’t be converted.
You might also see problems with a many-to-one mapping of principals. For instance, if you are using DNS lookups and you have two principals ‘rcmd.foo’ and ‘rcmd.bar’, where ‘foo’ is a CNAME for ‘bar’, the resulting principals will be the same. Since the conversion function can’t tell which is correct, these conflicts will have to be resolved manually.
Given the following set of hosts and services:
foo.se rcmd mail.foo.se rcmd, pop ftp.bar.se rcmd, ftp
you have a database that consists of the following principals:
‘rcmd.foo’, ‘rcmd.mail’, ‘pop.mail’, ‘rcmd.ftp’, and ‘ftp.ftp’.
lets say you also got these extra principals: ‘rcmd.gone’, ‘rcmd.old-mail’, where ‘gone.foo.se’ was a machine that has now passed away, and ‘old-mail.foo.se’ was an old mail machine that is now a CNAME for ‘mail.foo.se’.
When you convert this database you want the following conversions to be done:
rcmd.foo host/foo.se rcmd.mail host/mail.foo.se pop.mail pop/mail.foo.se rcmd.ftp host/ftp.bar.se ftp.ftp ftp/ftp.bar.se rcmd.gone removed rcmd.old-mail removed
A krb5.conf that does this looks like:
[realms] FOO.SE = { v4_name_convert = { host = { ftp = ftp pop = pop rcmd = host } } v4_instance_convert = { foo = foo.se ftp = ftp.bar.se } default_domain = foo.se }
The ‘v4_name_convert’ section says which names should be considered having an instance consisting of a hostname, and it also says how the names should be converted (for instance ‘rcmd’ should be converted to ‘host’). The ‘v4_instance_convert’ section says how a hostname should be qualified (this is just a hosts-file in disguise). Host-instances that aren’t covered by ‘v4_instance_convert’ are qualified by appending the contents of the ‘default_domain’.
Actually, this example doesn’t work. Or rather, it works to well. Since it has no way of knowing which hostnames are valid and which are not, it will happily convert ‘rcmd.gone’ to ‘host/gone.foo.se’. This isn’t a big problem, but if you have run your kerberos realm for a few years, chances are big that you have quite a few ‘junk’ principals.
If you don’t want this you can remove the ‘default_domain’ statement, but then you will have to add entries for all your hosts in the ‘v4_instance_convert’ section.
Instead of doing this you can use DNS to convert instances. This is not a solution without problems, but it is probably easier than adding lots of static host entries.
To enable DNS lookup you should turn on ‘v4_instance_resolve’ in the ‘[libdefaults]’ section.
The database conversion is done with ‘hprop’. You can run this command to propagate the database to the machine called ‘slave-server’ (which should be running a ‘hpropd’).
hprop --source=krb4-db --master-key=/.m slave-server
This command can also be to use for converting the v4 database on the server:
hprop -n --source=krb4-db -d /var/kerberos/principal --master-key=/.m | hpropd -n
Previous: Principal conversion issues, Up: Kerberos 4 issues [Contents]