ipa-client-automount server query

[Scott Dungan]

When attempting to setup a domain client to query the domain for automounts, we see the following:

ipa-client-automount --location=default
Searching for IPA server...
Autodiscovery was successful but didn't return a server

If we specify a server it works:

ipa-client-automount --location=default --server idm1.domain.com
IPA server: idm1.domain.com
Location: default
Continue to configure the system with these values? [no]:

This implies that the client will only query this server for automount entries, rather than all IPA replicas, so therefore it is not a redundant configuration. My question is how to populate DNS entries so that the command can find the server(s) automatically. We are using an external DNS service, so this may explain why the command is unable to find automount servers?

[Rob Crittenden]

Scott Dungan via FreeIPA-users wrote:
> When attempting to setup a domain client to query the domain for automounts, we see the following:
>
> ipa-client-automount --location=default
> Searching for IPA server...
> Autodiscovery was successful but didn't return a server
>
> If we specify a server it works:
>
> ipa-client-automount --location=default --server idm1.domain.com
> IPA server: idm1.domain.com
> Location: default
> Continue to configure the system with these values? [no]:
>
> This implies that the client will only query this server for automount entries, rather than all IPA replicas, so therefore it is not a redundant configuration. My question is how to populate DNS entries so that the command can find the server(s) automatically. We are using an external DNS service, so this may explain why the command is unable to find automount servers?

There is a command-line tool to help with this:

$ ipa dns-update-system-records --dry-run

Will show you the records it expects for discovery. You can also use the
--out option to create an nsupdate-compatible file to create the entries.

rob

[Scott Dungan]

Rob,

Thanks for that. I am aware of that tool and we used it to populate our
external DNS server. I can verify that all of the records identified do
exist in the DNS zone.

-Scott

On Fri, Nov 27, 2020 at 2:09 PM Rob Crittenden  wrote:
> Scott Dungan via FreeIPA-users wrote:
> > When attempting to setup a domain client to query the domain for
>
> automounts, we see the following:
> > ipa-client-automount --location=default
> > Searching for IPA server...
> > Autodiscovery was successful but didn't return a server
> >
> > If we specify a server it works:
> >
> > ipa-client-automount --location=default --server idm1.domain.com
> > IPA server: idm1.domain.com
> > Location: default
> > Continue to configure the system with these values? [no]:
> >
> > This implies that the client will only query this server for automount
>
> entries, rather than all IPA replicas, so therefore it is not a redundant
> configuration. My question is how to populate DNS entries so that the
> command can find the server(s) automatically. We are using an external DNS
> service, so this may explain why the command is unable to find automount
> servers?
>
> There is a command-line tool to help with this:
>
> $ ipa dns-update-system-records --dry-run
>
> Will show you the records it expects for discovery. You can also use the
> --out option to create an nsupdate-compatible file to create the entries.
>
> rob

[Scott Dungan]

I figured out the problem. It appears that the ipa-client-automount looks at the default domain name configured on the client and then queries that for srv records. In our case, the default domain name is not the same as the IDM domain.