Members of a replica set or a sharded cluster can use x.509 certificates for membership authentication to identify each other as memers of the same deployment.
To identify each others as members of the same deployment, the Organization attributes (O
's), the Organizational Unit attributes (OU
's), and the Domain Components (DC
's) from the certificates must match.
In some situations, you may need to update the member certificates to new certificates with the new Distinguished Name (DN
), such as if an organization changes its name. Starting in version 4.2, MongoDB provides a new tlsX509ClusterAuthDNOverride
parameter to set an alternative DN
to use in matching. Using this parameter, you can perform a rolling update of the certificates to new certificates with different DN
.
The following tutorial describes the process to update the certificates for a replica set without downtime.
Consider a replica set where each member's certificates (clusterFile
and certificateKeyFile
) with DN
value that contains "OU=10gen Server,O=10gen"
(additional attributes are not considered as part of the comparison):
net.tls.mode: requireTLS net.tls.certificateKeyFile: "./mycerts/10gen-server1.pem" net.tls.CAFile: "./mycerts/ca.pem" security.clusterAuthMode: x509 net.tls.clusterFile: "./mycerts/10gen-cluster1.pem" net.tls.clusterCAFile: "./mycerts/ca.pem"
The following procedure updates the members' certificates (clusterFile
and certificateKeyFile
) to new certificates that have a DN
value with "OU=MongoDB Server,O=MongoDB"
.
The following procedure assumes that the new x.509 certificates meet membership certificate all other requirements. For details, see Member Certificate Requirements
The procedure requires that all members of the deployment be restarted. As the settings will not take into consideration until you restart all members, your instances may log messages until the procedure completes.
To avoid these messages, you can set the override parameter on running members.
Connect mongosh
directly to each member of the deployment and set the tlsX509ClusterAuthDNOverride
parameter to the new certificate DN
:
db.adminCommand( { setParameter: 1, tlsX509ClusterAuthDNOverride: "OU=MongoDB Server,O=MongoDB" } )
Modify each member's configuration:
net.tls.certificateKeyFile
to the new certificate.net.tls.clusterFile
to the new certificate.tlsX509ClusterAuthDNOverride
parameter to the new certificate DN
.For example:
net.tls.mode: requireTLS net.tls.certificateKeyFile: "./mycerts/mongodb-server1.pem" net.tls.CAFile: "./mycerts/ca.pem" security.clusterAuthMode: x509 net.tls.clusterFile: "./mycerts/mongodb-cluster1.pem" net.tls.clusterCAFile: "./mycerts/ca.pem" setParameter: tlsX509ClusterAuthDNOverride: "OU=MongoDB Server,O=MongoDB"
The settings will not take into consideration until you restart each member (see next step).
Once you have modified the configuration for all the members, restart each secondary and then the primary.
For each secondary member, connect mongosh
to the member and:
Use the db.shutdownServer()
method to shut down the member:
use admin db.shutdownServer()
Restart the member.
Ensure the member has reached SECONDARY
state before restarting the next secondary.
For the primary, connect mongosh
to the member and
Use rs.stepDown()
to step down the member:
rs.stepDown()
Use the db.shutdownServer()
method to shut down the member:
use admin db.shutdownServer()
tlsX509ClusterAuthDNOverride
SettingOnce all the members have been restarted with the new certificate, you can remove the tlsX509ClusterAuthDNOverride
parameter from the configuration.
For example:
net.tls.mode: requireTLS net.tls.certificateKeyFile: "./mycerts/mongodb-server1.pem" net.tls.CAFile: "./mycerts/ca.pem" security.clusterAuthMode: x509 net.tls.clusterFile: "./mycerts/mongodb-cluster1.pem" net.tls.clusterCAFile: "./mycerts/ca.pem"
The settings will not take into consideration until you restart each member.