ipactl(8)

💖 ipactl — IPA Server Control Interface 💖

okay bestie, listen up: this is ipactl(8) from the IPA Manual Pages, and it's literally the remote control for your whole IPA server. she's simple, she's powerful, and she will absolutely not let your services start in the wrong order. periodt. 🎀

---

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

ipactl command

that's it. one command, and she handles the rest. iconic behaviour tbh. 💅

---

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so ipactl is a tool to help an administer control an IPA environment. (yes, "administer" — the original said it, we're keeping it, no cap.) 🫶

here's the tea: IPA glues several discrete services together so they all work in concert, and the order they get started and stopped in is actually important. like, genuinely. not me being dramatic. ipactl is the girl who makes sure they're started and stopped in the correct order every single time. main character energy, fr fr. 👑

IPA stores the available masters and the services configured on each one. so the first thing ipactl does is start (if it is not already running) the IPA 389-ds instance, so it can query what services it controls. 🧚

⚠️ important: the hostname used in that query needs to match the hostname of the value stored in LDAP. you can control this with the host option in /etc/ipa/default.conf. and bestie, this should be a fully-qualified hostname. do not skip that part, i'm begging. 😭

---

🌸 OPTIONS 🌸

the actual verbs, the ones that do the thing:

• start — start all of the services that make up IPA ✨
• stop — stop all of the services that make up IPA 💀
• restart — stop then start all of the services that make up IPA 🔁
• status — provides status of all the services that make up IPA 🔍

and the flags, the little garnish on top:

• -d, --debug — display debugging information 🐛
• --skip-version-check — skip version check ⏭️
• --ignore-service-failures — if any service start fails, do not rollback the services, continue with the operation 🫡
• -f, --force — force IPA to start. this is basically a combo meal: it combines the options --skip-version-check and --ignore-service-failures 🍓

---

💜 EXIT STATUS 💜

okay this part is the vibe check. every action except status reports like this:

• 0 — success 🎉
• 1 — a generic error occurred 😭
• 2 — unknown or invalid argument(s) 🙈
• 4 — user has insufficient privilege 🚫
• 6 — IPA server is not configured 💀

for the status action, it's a whole different set of numbers, iykyk:

• 0 — service is running 🟢
• 3 — service is not running 🔴
• 4 — service status is unknown (or unconfigured) ❓

⚠️ and heads up: if not executed as root, then the status action will return 4 for insufficient privileges. so yeah, root matters here. 👑

🌈 also lowkey important: some services are socket activated and may show as STOPPED by the status action. these services include ipa-ods-exporter and ipa-otpd. so if you see them looking asleep, they might just be chillin'. don't panic. 🧚

---

that's the whole page, bestie. go forth and control your IPA environment responsibly. 💖

signing off with love from the IPA manual pages — this one's dated Mar 14 2008, and it's ipactl(8) forever and always. 🎀✨