Updating a certificate for a FreeIPA web server

As I install, uninstall, and re-install FreeIPA, I start getting:sec_error_reused_issuer_and_serial. This used to be a minor annoyance, solved by clearing the certificates out of, and restarting, the browser.  Recent versions of Firefox have complained even after doing this, leading to the current approach: clear your browser cache.  Instead, you can update the certificate on the web server, and this should give you a cert with a new serial number, and avoid the error message.

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Announcing FreeIPA 2.1.0

Cross posted from the FreeIPA mailing lists:

The FreeIPA Project is proud to announce the latest release of the FreeIPA. As always, the latest tarball can be found at http://freeipa.org/

FreeIPA 2.1 is available in Fedora 15. It is currently in the updates-testing repository along with a number of its dependencies. Fedora 16 and rawhide builds will be coming soon.

== Highlights ==

* General client and server installation improvements. Server installation is significantly faster.
* Improved support for IPv6.
* General UI improvements related to navigation and work flow.
* Added UI for automount.
* A Host-based Access Control (HBAC) test tool
* Deprecation of HBAC deny rules
* A CA is no longer required on every replica and may be added post-install to a replica (see ipa-ca-install).
* A new replication tool for dogtag has been added (ipa-cs-manage). This allows you to control the replication topology of your CA.

 

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IPAddress for local Virtual Machines

When running Fedora as a KVM/Qemu  host for  virtual machines, you have the issue that you don’t know the IP Address for a virtual machine once you create it.  IP addresses that are assigned via

The MAC Address is in the config file saved in

/etc/libvirt/qemu/$VMNAME.xml

Once you start the virtual machine, you can fetch the IP Address from the DHCP lease file in:

/var/lib/dnsmasq/dnsmasq.leases

To correlate the two:

 

#!/bin/bash

VMNAME=$1

MAC=`cat /etc/libvirt/qemu/$VMNAME.xml |   xml2 | awk 'BEGIN{FS="="} /mac..address/ {print $2}'`

IP=`grep $MAC /var/lib/dnsmasq/dnsmasq.leases | cut -d' ' -f3`

#$VMNAME has MAC $MAC and IPAddress $IP
echo $IP

 

This must be called as root or via sudo.

UPDATE:

Chris Lalancette notes that the cannonical version of the MAC address can be found using

virsh -c qemu:///system dumpxml $VMNAME

What Jar File

When working a with a new project, I often find I am searching for the Jar files that fulfill a dependency. Sometimes they come from maven, sometimes from the Fedora RPMS. My approach has been to make a cache of the Jar files in the directories that I care about that contains a map from jar file name to class name:

#!/bin/bash

CACHE_FILE=/tmp/jarcache

echo > $CACHE_FILE

for DIR in /usr/share/java /usr/lib/java
do
    for JAR in `find $DIR -name \*.jar`
    do
        #only do the non-symlinked versions
        if [ -f $JAR ]
        then
            for CLASS_FILE in `jar -tf $JAR | grep \.class`
            do
                CLASS=`echo $CLASS_FILE | sed 's!/!.!g'`
                echo $JAR $CLASS >> $CACHE_FILE
            done
        fi
    done
done

Then call it this way:

grep "org.mozilla.jss.ssl" /tmp/jarcache

Removing empy comment blocks

Eclipse can automate a lot of stuff for you. One thig is did for me was automating the serialVersionId generation for all the serializable classes in my tree.
They look like this:

    /**
     *
     */
     private static final long serialVersionUID = -9031744976450947933L;

However, it put an empty block comment in on top of them, something I didn’t notice until I had mixed in this commit with another. So, I want to remove those empty comment blocks.

#!/bin/bash

for JAVAFILE in `find . -name \*.java`
do
     sed -n '1h;1!H;${;g;s! */\*\*\n *\* *\n *\*/ *\n!!g;p;}' \
         < $JAVAFILE > $JAVAFILE.new
     mv $JAVAFILE.new $JAVAFILE
done

Thanks to this article for how to do the multiline search and replace.
http://austinmatzko.com/2008/04/26/sed-multi-line-search-and-replace/

Binary Java Runner

I’ve been recently thinking about the scripts that are used to run Java processes. Firing a script interpreter and running a slew of processes before running your program seems really inefficient. Additionally, programs meant to run on a Fedora system can make a few assumptions that general Java programs can’t.

Jar files should be in /usr/share/java or /usr/lib/java.We don’t want people putting files all over the place. Most of the scripts are doing classpath related operations.

Here is my Sample code

class Hello{
    public static void main(String[] args){
        for (int i =0 ; i < args.length; i++){
            System.out.println ("Hello "+args[i]);
        }
    }
}

Which I can compile into a Jar file pretty easily. I'll cll the jar hello.jar

int main()
{

char *const argv[] = {"/usr/bin/java","-cp","hello.jar","Hello"};
char *newenviron[] = { NULL };

execve(argv[0], argv,newenviron);
perror("execve");
return 0;
}

This serves as a starting point.

But, really, do we want to have to ship a Jar file and a separate executable? For command line utilities, the basic classes that it requires should be statically bound into the application. We can convert the Jar file into data an link it into the application:

ld -r -b binary -o ant-launcher.o /usr/share/java/hello.jar
cc     runjava.c hello.o   -o runjava

Now is where things get interesting.

First, we need a way to load this Embedded Jar file in as a class. As a proof of concept, the C program can read the data section and spit it out to a jar file.


const char * temp_file_template = "hello.jar.XXXXXX";
char * temp_file = "hello.jar.XXXXXX";

void build_jar(){
  temp_file = malloc(strlen(temp_file_template)+1);
  memset(temp_file, 0, strlen(temp_file_template)+1);
  strcat(temp_file,  temp_file_template);

  int retval  = mkstemp(temp_file);

  int fd = open(temp_file,
                O_WRONLY | O_CREAT |  O_TRUNC
                ,S_IRWXU  );
  if (fd < 0){
    perror("main");
    return;
  }
  ssize_t sz =
    write (
           fd,
           &_binary_hello_jar_start,
           (ssize_t)&_binary_hello_jar_size);

  if (sz < 0){
    perror("Write");
  }

  close(fd);
}



This produces the same output as if we had run it from the initial example.

But, this is wasteful. This example will litter a copy of the jar file into your directory. You can't delete it when you are done; exec does not return to your code.

So the next step is, instead of running using exec, run using JNI.

/*run the executable using an embedded JVM*/
void run_embedded(){
  JNIEnv          *env;
  JavaVM          *jvm;
  JavaVMInitArgs  vm_args;
  JavaVMOption    options[2];
  int             option_count;
  jint            res;
  jclass          main_class;
  jobject         javaGUI;
  jmethodID       main_method;
  jthrowable exception;
  jobjectArray ret;
  int i;

  const char * classpath_prefix = "-Djava.class.path=";
  int classpath_option_length =
    strlen(classpath_prefix) + strlen(temp_file) + 1;

  char * classpath_option =
    malloc(classpath_option_length);

  memset(classpath_option, 0, classpath_option_length);

  strcat(classpath_option, classpath_prefix);
  strcat(classpath_option, temp_file);

  option_count=1; //set to 2 for jni debugging
  options[0].optionString = classpath_option;

  options[1].optionString = "-verbose:jni";

  /* Specifies the JNIversion used */
  vm_args.version  = JNI_VERSION_1_6;
  vm_args.options  = options;
  vm_args.nOptions = option_count;
  /* JNI won'tcomplain about unrecognized options */
  vm_args.ignoreUnrecognized = JNI_TRUE;
  res = JNI_CreateJavaVM(&jvm,(void **)&env,&vm_args);
  free(classpath_option);

  if (res < 0 ){
    exit(res);
  }
  const char * classname =   "Hello";
  main_class   = (*env)->FindClass(env, classname);
  if (check_error(main_class,env)) {
      return;
    }

  main_method = (*env)->GetStaticMethodID(env,main_class,"main",
                               "([Ljava/lang/String;)V");

  if (check_error(main_method,env)) {
    return;
  }

  char *message[5]= { "first", "second", "third", "fourth", "fifth"};

  jstring blank = (*env)->NewStringUTF(env, "");

  jobjectArray arg_array = (jobjectArray)(*env)->NewObjectArray
    (env,5,
     (*env)->FindClass(env,"java/lang/String"),
     blank);
  if (check_error(arg_array,env)) {
    return;
  }

  for(i=0;i<5;i++) {
    jstring str = (*env)->NewStringUTF(env, message[i]);
    (*env)->SetObjectArrayElement
      ( env,arg_array,i,str);
  }

  jobject result =
    (*env)->CallStaticObjectMethod(env, main_class, main_method, arg_array );

  if (check_error(result,env)) {
    return;
  }
}

Note that we have now linked against a version of the JVM, and that commits us to a given JDK. This is just a proof-of-concept; This whole copy the Jar approach is just a stepping stone.

What we really want is a classloader which plays by the following rules:

  • lets the rt.jar classloader safely load the basic java, javax, and other JRE classes as a normal executable
  • makes sure that all the classes for our application get loaded from our specified jar file
  • reads our specified jar file directly out of the elf section of our binary executable
    • I appears to me that the standard classloading approach is fine for our needs with one exception: we can't treat an ELF file as if it were a Jar file. If we could do that, we could throw argv[0] on the front of the -Djava.class.path command line switch and be off and running. This would have the added benefit of creating a classloader extension that could be used from other Java programs as well. I'm currently thinking it should be of the form: file+elf://path-to-file/linked_jarfile_name

      as that format would allow us to link in multiple jar files.

      However, to be really efficient, we don't want to have to pay the price for the OS file operations (open, read) again, since the jar file is already loaded into memory. We should be able to create a protocol which tells the classloader: use this InputStream to load the class, and the JNI code can then pass the input stream.