It would be good to have something which automatically backs up this directory as we see a support case where someone has deleted their CAdir every few weeks.
Lacking that no putting the CAdir in the same place as the ssldir would be a good step. While we have worked to change the docs to say customers should move this dir there is advice elsewhere on the internet saying to delete it.
Customers who do not have a backup are faced with a pretty big task of rekeying all of their agents. While bolt can help with this if the customer has setup ssh keys(many do not or do not want to), tasks in PE can't because they rely on this same SSL infrastructure.
Justin Stoller and I talked through this; a bit more guidance:
the new CA dir ought to be under /etc/puppetlabs/puppetserver/ca, though the location should still be relocatable via a puppetserver.conf setting
new installations should use that by default; existing installations should look in the old /etc/puppetlabs/puppet/ssl/ca directory and use that without modification if it exists (i.e. do not try to auto-migrate people's CA certs. that path lies madness!)
the CLI tool from SERVER-2162 ought to provide an affordance for people to migrate an existing CA (whether single root+intermediate combo or root-only) from the old setup into a root+intermediate combo in the new location
if we migrate it should also bring over the old CRL
the implications on PE installations, both new and upgrades, need to be considered as part of this work (but under separate tickets)
Eric Sorenson When we say that existing installations should look in the old CA dir first, do we mean to only look in the default location, or to respect the old setting? This has implications for when/how we remove the CA's Ruby dependency.
Maggie Dreyer Hm, I feel like we need to respect the previous setting - the goal is to avoid a hard break for sites who are upgrading, and I think that includes the case where they've relocated the ssl dir via setting.