A Smooth Sea Never Made a Skillful Sailor

Today, we're going to look at an actual question I was asked when it comes to Kerberos.

This is my fourth installment of CockroachDB and Kerberos coverage. Today, I'm going to demonstrate a way to override a service principal name from the default.

This is the third in the series of articles on CockroachDB and GSSAPI. Today, we're going to automate all things with Docker and docker-compose specifically to stand-up a quick and repeatable environment to troubleshoot CockroachDB and Kerberos. Most of the articles I write are based on specific corner cases my customers are stumbling on. Today, I'm going to talk about a basic environment I would use to debug a situation with Kerberos and CockroachDB integration. In the following posts, I will cover actual corner cases I've seen to date.

Back in May, we announced support for Flyway , a popular schema migration tool. Prior to joining Cockroach Labs, I was unfamiliar with the schema migration concept and this was a good opportunity to dip my toes in. Today, I am going to quickly introduce you to Flyway and some of the new capabilities in CockroachDB 20.1 leveraging schema migrations. This is by no means a deep-dive on Flyway, for that, I highly recommend you get familiar with Flyway's documentation . Also, it's a good opportunity to review our 20.1 release announcement for all the goodness in our current release. With that, let's dive in.

Today, I am going to discuss CockroachDB integration with Active Directory. AD is the commercial brother of Kerberos maintained by Microsoft. AD is a de facto authentication standard across large enterprises and our customers expect products calling themselves enterprise to work seamlessly with Active Directory. Hence, here's my write-up with end to end steps to deploy a lab environment to try on your own.

CockroachDB is a cloud native distributed database that works across various cloud, hybrid and on premise environments. The flexibility of deployments demand varying degrees of security protocols. Most of the time, on premise customers won't accept anything less than Kerberos for their system of record authentication mechanisms. In my Hadoop time, that was the bare minimum requirement to play. CockroachDB today supports Kerberos via GSSAPI for authentication. In this post, I'm going to walk you through setting up Kerberos for CockroachDB and provide a sort of cheat sheet, to make this process more seamless. I'm using a single Centos VM provisioned with Vagrant. It servers as my KDC as well as my CockroachDB instance. On to the setup. The following documents may assist in the entire process: CockroachDB GSSAPI , how to install CockroachDB and configuring CockroachDB for secure access . I recorded the entire process with Asciinema, I split the screencast into two parts. P...

CockroachDB out of the box comes with ability to generate certificates with cockroach cert command. This command will provision certs for client and nodes. One common gap we get from our customers is the explicit reliance on CN=node and CN=root . In our latest development release, we're introducing ability to map root and node principals to custom CNs. The process bypasses cockroach cert command in favor of openssl utility. It is very well documented and I recorded a live walk-through of the entire process. I am including my openssl configuration files for convenience: ca.cnf # OpenSSL CA configuration file [ ca ] default_ca = CA_default [ CA_default ] default_days = 365 database = index.txt serial = serial.txt default_md = sha256 copy_extensions = copy unique_subject = no # Used to create the CA certificate. [ req ] prompt=no distinguished_name = distinguished_name x509_extensions = extensions [ distinguished_name ] organizationName = Example Inc commonName = Exampl...