(For my Brother Bill, on his Birthday)
Now shut your mouths and mind your ears my story has begun
about our man behind the bar good William Joseph Young
He’ll Flip the bottle, tell a joke and then he’ll fill your glass
And if you’ve mind to misbehave he’ll set you on your ass
Here are the most frequently asked (technical) questions by people about Red Hat Enterprise Identity (IPA) from this past week at the Red Hat summit.
Question: What is it?
Answer: IPA is a domain controller for Linux/Unix environments. For the Linux/Unix world it does what Active Directory does in the Windows world, but following open standards and by the means of open source software. It is an identity management solution that integrates MIT Kerberos, LDAP via Red Hat Directory Server, DNS via Bind with an LDAP back end, and a Certificate Signing Authority (Dog Tag). Its administration framework is a Python based server that runs inside Apache HTTPD.
This past week at the Red Hat summit I got the chance to demonstrate Enterprise IPA, the Red Hat version of FreeIPA, at the Red Hat booth. One of the aspects of IPA we want to showcase is registering client systems. That means that I wanted to be able to get a client system in the pre-installed state pretty very quickly. My approach was to use Qemu/KVM virtual machines. I had one VM image that I did not touch, and all the rest of the virtual machines will be snapshots that overlay that image.