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Showing posts from March, 2026

FreeIPA - Un-bricking DNSSEC after SoftHSM Token Loss

I've been using DNSSEC to sign my internal DNS zones with FreeIPA for quite some time now and have never had any problems. But suddenly, I noticed ipa-dnskeysyncd.service was continuously failing to start, throwing this traceback: dnssec-keyfromlabel: fatal: failed to get key RSASHA256: not found ipa-dnskeysyncd.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE Looking deeper into the logs, I could see that LDAP was happily reporting it was adding key metadata to my zones, but the local token was instantly rejecting it: The public key was not found at: pkcs11:object=... The root cause turned out to be a cryptographic "split-brain" situation. The metadata stored in the LDAP directory was correct, but the actual cryptographic private/public key material stored by the local SoftHSM token was missing. You can verify if your saved keys are actually in the token by pointing pkcs11-tool at the FreeIPA SoftHSM database: [root@ipa03 ~]# export SOFTHSM2_CONF=/e...