[Pki-devel] testing pki-ca behind apache for ipa

Adam, As you know, I have been testing putting a dogtag CA behind an apache instance - and using the standard ports to contact the CA. The basic idea is to let apache handle the client authentication required, and then to pass the relevant parameters to tomcat using AJP. What this means is there will be a dogtag.conf file placed under /etc/httpd/httpd.conf - and this file will contain Location elements with ProxyPass directives. Some of these (agent pages) will require client authentication, and some will not. I had run into an issue with my browser where when switching from non-client-auth to client-auth, renegotiations were being disallowed. This is, I strongly suspect due to the fixes in NSS for the MITM issue, where "unsafe" legacy renegotiations will be disallowed. Attempts to pass the relevant environment parameters to NSS failed to alter this result. I'll continue to work with Rob on this. However, I believe that this problem will not affect the installation/ interaction of IPA with dogtag. Why? Because the ipa-ra-plugin is using the latest NSS under the covers - which uses the new safe regotiation protocol. My initial testing seems to indicate that this is in fact the case. However, as I have been pulled into fips issues, I was hoping you could continue the testing. Once we have a working setup, we can worry about the code changes to pkicreate/pkisilent to do most of the configuration. Here is what you need to do: 1. Install ipa with dogtag 2. Stop the CA (service pki-cad stop pki-ca) 3. Modify /etc/pki-ca/server.xml. You need to uncomment the ajp port, and have it redirect for SSL to the EE port (9444) 4. Modify the web.xml in /var/lib/pki-ca/webapps/ca/WEB-INF/web.xml to turn off the filtering mechanism. You will see stanzas like the following for ee, agent and admin ports. Make sure that active is set to false for all. <filter> <filter-name>AgentRequestFilter</filter-name> <filter-class>com.netscape.cms.servlet.filter.AgentRequestFilter</filter-class> <init-param> <param-name>https_port</param-name> <param-value>9203</param-value> </init-param> <init-param> <param-name>active</param-name> <param-value>false</param-value> </init-param> </filter> 5. Place the attached dogtag.conf file into /etc/httpd/conf.d/ 6. restart the ca. (service pki-cad start pki-ca) We are now ready to do some testing. 1. Modify the ipa-ra-plugin config to point to port 443 instead of 9443 2. Do your IPA cert tests and confirm that it works ok. 3. Try installing a replica. Make sure to pass https://hostname:443 That is - do not leave out the 443 part as the installation code will not recognize 443 as a default port. Actually, now that I think about it - there will be more changes needed in the Installation Panel code to get all this to work. So I'll get to this when I can. Thanks, Ade