NSS Test Day

DATE	TIME	WHERE
2009-10-29	From 12:00 to 21:00 UTC (8am -> 5pm EDT)	#fedora-test-day (webirc)

What to test?

Today's installment of Fedora Test Day will focus on NSS

Who's available

The following cast of characters will be available testing, workarounds, bug fixes, and general discussion ...

• Development - User:emaldonado, User:rrelyea
• Quality Assurance - User:amacerek, User:avagarwa, User:TBD

Prerequisite for Test Day

List any prerequisite needs for the test event. A fresh system, virtualized guest, a blank DVD ... a desire to break software?

• Rawhide Fully updated
• NSS 3.12.4
• Openswan
• mod_nss
• nss_compat_ossl
• crypto-utils

How to test?

High level details on how a contributor can get involved. This can include (but not limited to):

• Areas to target with exploratory testing

 Updating to NSS 3.13.1 from a prior version of NSS/Fedora
 Enabling system NSS
 Openswan Pluto
 crypto-utils certificate management tools for Apache

• A list of pre-defined test cases to execute TBD

• How to report back results

Test Cases

Testing out system NSS.

Part 1: enabling system NSS

In Fedora 12, system NSS is available, but not enabled. The following steps will enable system NSS.

1) As root run

certutil -K -X -d sql:/etc/pki/nssdb (this will create sql db's from the local dbm database).

2) as root edit /etc/pki/nssdb/pkcs11.txt

 2a) stanza with NSS Internal PKCS #11 Module, change:
   library=
 to
   library=libnsssysinit.so
 2b) in the same stanza, on the NSS= change the Flags from:
   Flags=internal,critical
 to
   Flags=internal,moduleDBOnly,critical
 2c) save your changes (Note, there should be no spaces in the library= line, nor any spaces between the flags.

3) as yourself, in your .bashrc or .cshrc (or whatever shell you use) add:

   export NSS_DEFAULT_DB_TYPE=sql
  [ of cource for csh/tcsh that sould be setenv 'NSS_DEFAULT_DB_TYPE sql' ]

4) as yourself (not as root!!!) 'certutil -N -d sql:/etc/pki/nssdb'. If you supply a password, this password will eventually become your new firefox/thunderbird master password.

Part 2: convince Firefox, Seamonkey, Xulrunner and Thunderbird to use system NSS. Firefox and Thunderbird still use private directories to store their NSS databases. It's possible, however, to convince them to open system NSS. All these steps should be performed as a user. In the future these applications would handle these steps by themselves automatically.

Do each of the following steps in each of the profile directories for which you wish to use system NSS in. Firefox, thunderbird, and seamonkey each have their own directories and can have multiple profiles (if you don't know what a profile is, you probably only have one per application). You can the base of the profile directories for firefox at ~/.mozilla/firefox and thunderbird at ~/.thunderbird. In that base directory there is a file called 'profiles.ini' which lists all the profiles that are known for that application. For each profile there's a line called 'Path=' which points to the actual profile directory. Usually it's a subdirectory under the current directory and has a random 'salted' name like 'quxz7me5.default'. do the following instructions while cd'd to that directory:

1) certutil -K -X -d sql:.

  (if you have a master password set, You'll have to provide it here). This will create a new sql database from your old dbm database.

2) certutil --merge -d sql:~/.pki/nssdb --source-dir sql:.

  (if you have a password set on sql:~/.pki/nssdb (from step 4 above), You'll have to provide it here. If that password is different from the master password for the profile, you'll also have to supply the profile password. If ~/.pki/nssdb has to password, but the profile database does, ~/.pki/nssdb will inherit that password (which you will then need on future instances of this step). If you want to change that password use 'certutil -N -d sql:~/.pki/nssdb'. Supplying an empty password will remove any password.

2) edit pkcs11.txt

  2a) in the 'NSS Internal PKCS #11 Module' stanza. change:
   parameters=configdir='/home/{you}/.mozilla/firefox/quxy6me8.default' ..... Flags=internal,critical
     to
   parameters="configdir='sql:/etc/pki/nssdb' ..... Flags=internal,critical,moduleDBOnly"
  NOTE: the ... represents a very long string of parameters that should remain the same. Note the addition of the double quotes around the parameters. This tells NSS to use the parameters as given and now rebuild them based on application input.
  2b) save pkcs11.txt

3) Make sure you set NSS_DEFAULT_DB_TYPE to sql in your environment before you start FF or TB

Restoring your system to the old databases: Simply unset the NSS_DEFAULT_DB_TYPE variable and all your applications will fall back to their former dbm style datbase

Test Results

Construct a table or list to allow testers to post results. Each column should be a test case or configuration, and each row should consist of test results. For example:

User	Smolt Profile	Sample test 1	Sample test 2	Sample test 3	Sample test 4	References
User:FasUser	HW	PASS	PASS	FAIL	PASS