The basic technology is solid and the admin tools reasonable. However it has the same
problems as all large, integrated systems: if the system isn’t in exactly the state they
expect, significant administrative operations such as upgrading version or adding a
replica will fail. Those things are done by python code with large libraries. If you have
to debug it and you’re not familiar with the code it can take a while. It’s not common,
but we’ve run into a couple of failures, both on version upgrade and adding replica.
My impression is that the cert code is the most trouble-prone. If you don’t need it to
manage certificates, install it without that facility. You can’t change once it’s
installed, as far as I can see: I think you can add a cert system, but I don’t believe you
can remove it.
It’s kind of hard to come up with any reasonable alternatives to IPA though, if you need
what it does. If you need kerberos and user management, particularly if you need redundant
servers or two-factor authentication (we needed both), it would be a real challenge to do
it any other way (other than using Active Directory, and that has issues of its own, and
getting two factor working in Linux might not be practical).
Run the ipa servers in VMs. Before doing upgrades, copy the VMs and try the upgrade in the
copy. VMs also simplify backups. You can just snapshot all the systems. That gives you a
clean, consistent backup. (Indeed some of the documentation implies that the alternative
ways of doing backup have enough issues that running in VMs is the only reasonable
approach.)
I didn’t start out to do IPA. I needed a new Kerberos server. (Ours was so out of date
that update was impractical.) I also wanted to replace a much of semi-consistent NIS
domains with good central management. I looked at doing MIT Kerberos and Open LDAP. But
then I’d have to build management tools. It looked like the IPA designers had thought
about most of the things we’d need. The Unix traditionalist in my still hates huge
python-bases systems. But I think IPA is kind of inevitable if you need what it does.
Note that I’m using the copy that’s bundled with Centos. I think that’s more likely to
work than installing freeipa over a random OS. The systems you’re managing don’t have to
be Centos. But for the servers I strongly recommend Redhat or Centos.
On May 8, 2018, at 5:23:58 AM, Duncan Colhoun via FreeIPA-users
<freeipa-users(a)lists.fedorahosted.org> wrote:
Hi All
I hope this is the appropriate forum for this question.
Can I get some feedback on the overall experience setting up and running Free-IPA. I am
looking at implementing Free-IPA to enhance/replace an OpenLDAP environment.
So please share any horror/success stories.
Rgds
Duncan
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