From: openldap-technical-bounces@OpenLDAP.org [mailto:openldap-technical-bounces@OpenLDAP.org] On Behalf Of Borresen, John - 0442 - MITLL
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 9:38 AM
To: openldap-technical@openldap.org
Subject: OPENLDAP & SSL -- FOR FAILOVER
Question:
Right now, we have two OpenLDAP servers running in Delta-syncrepl and talking fine. All the clients are connecting to the primary over port 636. The question is on the best (practices) way of getting the secondary server into the certificate without re-hashing all the clients to the failover server's certificate.
1) Should I set up a Wildcard certificate?
2) Should I put both systems in the "subjectAltName" line and create the certifiate, etc?
3) DNS Round-Robin?
Not 100% sure in which direction to go.
Dave Borresen
Solaris/Linux Systems Administrator
Surveillance Systems Group
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, MA 02420
[Aaron Bennett]
Hi Dave,
We’ve got the same setup here, about to be deployed into production and fairly well tested. We’re using DNS Round Robin to serve up ‘ldap.clarku.edu’ with two N-Way multimaster servers behind it. We settle on having a cert issued to ldap.clarku.edu with each of the component nodes as a subjectAltName and it’s worked well, allowing each node to communicate with either other via their actual hostnames and not having any issues there.
One suggestion if you are using RedHat 6 / CentOS 6, don’t use the vendor-supplied OpenLDAP build. Not only is it old, it’s built against the never-to-be-sufficiently-dammed (or at least, not ready for prime time) Mozilla NSS library. I’m using 2.4.30 built against OpenSSL and it hasn’t failed in any of our testing.
Best,
Aaron
---
Aaron Bennett
Manager, Systems Administration
Clark University ITS