System Administration Guide: Security Services

Backing Up and Propagating the Kerberos Database

Propagating the Kerberos database from the master KDC to the slave KDCs is one of the most important configuration tasks. If propagation doesn't happen often enough, the master KDC and the slave KDCs will lose synchronization. So, if the master KDC goes down, the slave KDCs will not have the most recent database information. Also, if a slave KDC has been configured as a master KDC for purposes of load balancing, the clients that use that slave KDC as a master KDC will not have the latest information. Therefore, you must make sure that propagation occurs often enough or else configure the servers for incremental propagation, based on how often you change the Kerberos database. Incremental propagation is preferred over manual propagation because there is more administrative overhead when you manually propagate the database. Also, there are inefficiencies when you do full propagation of the database.

When you configure the master KDC, you set up the kprop_script command in a cron job to automatically back up the Kerberos database to the /var/krb5/slave_datatrans dump file and propagate it to the slave KDCs. But, as with any file, the Kerberos database can become corrupted. If data corruption occurs on a slave KDC, you might never notice, because the next automatic propagation of the database installs a fresh copy. However, if corruption occurs on the master KDC, the corrupted database is propagated to all of the slave KDCs during the next propagation. And, the corrupted backup overwrites the previous uncorrupted backup file on the master KDC.

Because there is no “safe” backup copy in this scenario, you should also set up a cron job to periodically copy the slave_datatrans dump file to another location or to create another separate backup copy by using the dump command of kdb5_util. Then, if your database becomes corrupted, you can restore the most recent backup on the master KDC by using the load command of kdb5_util.

Another important note: Because the database dump file contains principal keys, you need to protect the file from being accessed by unauthorized users. By default, the database dump file has read and write permissions only as root. To protect against unauthorized access, use only the kprop command to propagate the database dump file, which encrypts the data that is being transferred. Also, kprop propagates the data only to the slave KDCs, which minimizes the chance of accidentally sending the database dump file to unauthorized hosts.


Caution – Caution –

If the Kerberos database is updated after it has been propagated and if the database subsequently is corrupted before the next propagation, the KDC slaves will not contain the updates. The updates will be lost. For this reason, if you add significant updates to the Kerberos database before a regularly scheduled propagation, you should manually propagate the database to avoid data loss.


The kpropd.acl File

The kpropd.acl file on a slave KDC provides a list of host principal names, one name per line, that specifies the systems from which the KDC can receive an updated database through propagation. If the master KDC is used to propagate all the slave KDCs, the kpropd.acl file on each slave needs to contain only the host principal name of the master KDC.

However, the Kerberos installation and subsequent configuration steps in this book instruct you to add the same kpropd.acl file to the master KDC and the slave KDCs. This file contains all the KDC host principal names. This configuration enables you to propagate from any KDC, in case the propagating KDCs become temporarily unavailable. And, by keeping an identical copy on all KDCs, you make the configuration easy to maintain.

The kprop_script Command

The kprop_script command uses the kprop command to propagate the Kerberos database to other KDCs. If the kprop_script command is run on a slave KDC, it propagates the slave KDC's copy of the Kerberos database to other KDCs. The kprop_script accepts a list of host names for arguments, separated by spaces, which denote the KDCs to propagate.

When kprop_script is run, it creates a backup of the Kerberos database to the /var/krb5/slave_datatrans file and copies the file to the specified KDCs. The Kerberos database is locked until the propagation is finished.