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How To Fix RHEL / CentOS 6.4 LDAP MD5 Cert Error

Recently we updated to the latest RHEL 6.4 which caused LDAP to stop using our MD5 signed  certificate. This was due to the nss-3.14.0 update that now deems MD5 as unsecure. This change caused authentication of users using LDAP to fail. If the account had a local password (such as root), they were able to login.

Since creating / updating the MD5 certificate was not an immediate solution for us we had to find a way to use what we have while we work on a permanent solution Here are a few of the workarounds.

Option 1

The first option involves modifying each kernel line in /etc/grub.conf and adding support for MD5 as well as creating a file in /etc/profile.d exporting this variable. In our situation this option did not work, but others on the Internet it worked.

Add in /etc/grub.conf to the end of kernel lines
systemd.setenv=NSS_HASH_ALG_SUPPORT=+MD5

Create /etc/profile.d/nss.sh
export NSS_HASH_ALG_SUPPORT=+MD5

Reboot the server

Option 2

The second option adds the export option to /etc/sysconfig/init. This option worked for allowing users to connect via ssh, but it did not allow authentication when accessing via a console, like Open Console option in vSphere.

Add to /etc/sysconfig/init
export NSS_HASH_ALG_SUPPORT=+MD5

Reboot the server

Option 3

The third option involves downgrading nss packages to 3.13 and adding an exclusion in /etc/yum.conf to not allow an update to nss 3.14 or higher. This was the option that worked for our situation.

You will need to downgrade nss, nss-tools, nss-sysinit and nss-util.

yum downgrade nss nss-tools nss-sysinit nss-util

Next open /etc/yum.conf and add / change:

exclude=nss*

Reboot the server

I hope one of these options helps you in your situation.

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