HOWTO : Configure OpenSSH to Fetch Public Keys from OpenLDAP for Authentication on CentOS

Today we will configure our OpenLDAP server to store SSH public keys so that the OpenSSH daemon can fetch them and thus authenticate our users.

To do this, we first need two CentOS machines. This is easy to achieve via a KickStart. If you need help building a KickStart server, follow my previous blog post. Then we need a working OpenLDAP server. If you don't have one, then follow my previous blog posts to set one up.

Oracle Solaris 10 Kerberized SSH Configuration

If you manage Oracle Solaris 10 machines, you might want to configure your servers to accept Kerberos principals via SSH. The SSH that comes with Solaris 10 does not understand the same configurations as the OpenSSH one does. And Solaris has a little quirk that Linux and BSD don't.

If you don't already have a Kerberos infrastrucutre in place, then the first thing to do is to set one up. Read my other article HOWTO : Kerberos KDC with OpenLDAP 2.4 Back-End and SASL GSSAPI Authentication on CentOS 6.2 to learn how to create a Kerberos realm.

MySQL Backup and Recovery

If your site manages it's data with MySQL, then you obviously need to make sure the data is safe. In this blog post, I will show how to create a daily backup automatically. I will also show a continuous data protection plan for MySQL databases. This blog post uses the previous backup server configured in my Secure Backup & Recovery with rsnapshot, rssh and OpenSSH article.

HOWTO : OpenLDAP 2.4 Users & Groups Management and PAM Authentication on CentOS 6.2

Today we will create and manage users and groups in our OpenLDAP 2.4 daemon running on a CentOS 6.2 machine. Recall our goals :

1. Install OpenLDAP 2.4.
2. Configure Transport Layer Security (TLS).
3. Manage users and groups in OpenLDAP.
4. Configure pam_ldap to authenticate users via OpenLDAP.
5. Use OpenLDAP as sudo's configuration repository.
6. Use OpenLDAP as automount map repository for autofs.
7. Use OpenLDAP as NFS netgroup repository again for autofs.
8. Use OpenLDAP as the Kerberos principal repository.
9. Setup OpenLDAP backup and recovery.
10. Setup OpenLDAP replication.