Migrating to new hardware - best practises?

Richard E. Silverman res at qoxp.net
Sat Jun 11 02:46:13 EDT 2011


Bjørn Tore Sund <bjorn.sund at adm.uib.no> writes:

> Hi,
>
> We have been running our KDCs on a dual Sun Solaris 10 setup for five
> years, currently at MIT Kerberos 1.6.  The hardware is out of support, Sun
> Solaris is going away by local policy and so we need to migrate to a dual
> RHEL 6 setup with whatever version of MIT Kerberos is current from rpms on
> that platform - currently 1.8.2.
>
> After googling for a while I thought I'd ask here - is there a best
> practices document we can use to plan the procedure?

One suggestion: if you're using file-based storage for the principal
database, do a dump and reload rather than try to copy the binary files
over; they will likely not be compatible.  On the old host:

# dump the database to the file kerberos.db
#
$ sudo kdb5_util -r REALM dump kerberos.db

... and on the new host:

# initialize a new database
#
$ sudo kdb5_util -r REALM create -s

# and load your principal data into it
#
$ sudo kdb5_util -r REALM load kerberos.db

Also, a warning: there is a bug in 1.8 which sometimes prevents
authentication from Unix clients to Windows-based services when the
service ticket employs an RC4 session key.  The bug was not present in
1.6.3, and disappeared with 1.9.1.  I downgraded from 1.8 to 1.6.3 to
buy myself time until I had a chance to debug it, but 1.9.1 came out
first, so I never did track it down.

-- 
  Richard Silverman
  res at qoxp.net



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