[kerberos-discuss] LDAP & Kerberos interaction & SIGPIPE

[Tom Yu]

Peter Shoults <Peter.Shoults at Sun.COM> writes:

> I am sending this out again as the customer has tested a fix I provided
> and determined that it does resolve their issue.  I would like to move
> forward with a fix, and the one I am using now is the one mentioned
> below with the addition of signal().  If I can get some comments, I
> would appreciate it.  Otherwise - I guess I will just proceed to put
> this into Solaris code.
>
> Pete

Is there a reason to not use sigaction() here if possible?  That
should make things more portable than calling signal().

> On 09/16/09 10:48, Peter Shoults wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Customer has brought forward an issue they were having with Kerberos and
>> LDAP, where LDAP is being used to store the database information for
>> Kerberos.  The issue is that if the LDAP server is restarted for any
>> reason, then Kerberos does not automatically resync back with the LDAP
>> server when the LDAP server is back up and running.  Specifically, one
>> can run and login into kadmin, but any commands that are run will fail
>> with the error:
>>
>> "Communication failure with server while retrieving list."
>>
>> It turns out if the user exits from kadmin and logs back in a second
>> time, then the command do work fine.
>>
>> I have determined that the cause of this problem is that when the LDAP
>> server is restarted, all the connections we have on port 636 to the LDAP
>> server go into a CLOSE_WAIT/FIN_WAIT_2 state.  When we log into kadmin,
>> we attempt to contact the LDAP server on these connections, and we
>> received SIGPIPE in response to our writes.  Here is a snippet from truss:
>>
>> 3200/1:         57.2401 write(14, 0x0010B810, 23)                      
>> Err#32 EPIPE
>> 3200/1:                             150301\012941A 60F Y P87A7BE9318B6
>> c8C |0F   v
>> 3200/1:         57.2404     Received signal #13, SIGPIPE [caught]
>>
>> This is fine - the sig_pipe handler is invoked and we do print out the
>> syslog message.  However, we never reset the signal disposition for
>> SIGPIPE.    kadmind process immediately proceeds to try the next
>> connection to the LDAP server, and again gets SIGPIPE.  This time
>> though, the default handler is invoked, which terminates kadmind.  At
>> this point, SMF realizes kadmind has died and restarts it, which
>> re-establishes all our connections to the LDAP server and that explains
>> why a subsequent login to kadmin will work.
>>
>> I have two questions about this.  The first why do we have a handler for
>> SIGPIPE in the kadmin code, unlike the krb5kdc code, which sets SIGPIPE
>> disposition to SIG_IGNORE.  This handler in the kadmin code has not
>> changed in a long long time.  I tested setting SIGPIPE to SIG_IGN and
>> this does allow a user to enter commands into kadmin after LDAP server
>> restarts and run commands without issue.
>>
>> Assuming we have the SIGPIPE handler specifically to output the syslog
>> message, then I propose that we have in the handler a resetting of the
>> signal disposition to sig_pipe.  I have also tested this fix and
>> verified that this also resolves the problem and allows the user to
>> enter kadmin commands after LDAP server restarts.  Here is my change:
>>
>> file modified is ovsec_kadmd.c
>>
>> void
>> sig_pipe(int unused)
>> {
>> +        signal(SIGPIPE, sig_pipe);
>>         krb5_klog_syslog(LOG_NOTICE, gettext("Warning: Received a SIGPIPE; "
>>                 "probably a client aborted.  Continuing."));
>> }
>>
>>
>> Pete
>>
>>   
>
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