[CentOS-devel] RHEL IdM update in CentOS 8 Stream

Thu Jan 21 13:58:48 UTC 2021
Alexander Bokovoy <abokovoy at redhat.com>

Hi,

thanks for Carl and Brian, yesterday's compose of CentOS 8 Stream now
includes RHEL IdM bits slated for RHEL 8.4. Several components were
rebased to their upstream versions and are worth noting to those who
want to test them in advance of RHEL 8.4.

Note that these are not final RHEL IdM updates for RHEL 8.4. While RHEL
builds already passed through a comprehensive QA cycle, there are still
few improvements that will come during next month or so. Bugs found by
CentOS 8 Stream users would in general be seen in the same way as those
found by RHEL QE teams during the RHEL minor release development, so it
is your opportunity to help. Also improvements in form of upstream
patches are welcome too.

There are many small and large fixes and improvements in FreeIPA 4.9.0.
For more detailed information I'd point to FreeIPA 4.9.0 release notes:
https://www.freeipa.org/page/Releases/4.9.0#Highlights_in_4.9.0

Among those changes, we are looking for a feedback to following
features of RHEL IdM in CentOS 8 Stream:

== ACME CA integration

With FreeIPA 4.9 and Dogtag 10.10 it is now possible to deploy ACME
support in FreeIPA CA and issue certificates using ACME protocol. For
more details please look at https://www.freeipa.org/page/V4/ACME for
general design overview and Fraser's blogs around the feature:
https://frasertweedale.github.io/blog-redhat/tags/acme.html

CentOS 8 Stream includes mod_md Apache module as one of ACME clients.
Fedora and EPEL do also have a certbot, so there are multiple clients to
use. Interoperability testing with other clients would also be great to
see reported.

== Active Directory integration improvements

There are enhancements for services for user (S4U) feature of Kerberos
protocol extensions in Active Directory. In particular, it is now
possible to run MS SQL server on a server enrolled into RHEL IdM domain
and allow access to it to users of trusted Active Directory forests,
along with IPA users. MS SQL does certain operations that required
functionality not supported by RHEL IdM. This was fixed in RHEL 8.3.
More improvements are available in CentOS 8 Stream, including
performance improvements when creating Kerberos tickets for Active
Directory users with a large AD group membership.

== Non-FQDN host support

FreeIPA requires uniform hostname support -- either all systems defined
with fully-qualified hostnames or they all are using non-FQDN. In
practice, there are checks in the installers to always force FQDN host
names. There are many applications that insist on seeing hostnames as
non-fully qualified. FreeIPA 4.9.0 adds ability to enroll non-FQDN
hosts to otherwise FQDN-based IPA deployment. 

In addition, this allows to enroll clients with hostnames of total FQDN
length longer than 64 characters on Linux.

== FIPS support

RHEL IdM in CentOS 8 Stream is now capable to be deployed and operated
in FIPS mode. One notable omission is the support for trusted Active
Directory domains. We are working on FIPS support for trust to AD
upstream and already have a good progress. Hopefully, this work will be
completed in upcoming weeks and will also land in CentOS 8 Stream.

== DNS support improvements

PTR records now supported in any zone type to facilitate DNS-SD
[RFC6763] operations, for example, publishing printers.



-- 
/ Alexander Bokovoy
Sr. Principal Software Engineer
Security / Identity Management Engineering
Red Hat Limited, Finland