Keystone Token & Auth Failure Triage Prompt
Diagnose Keystone authentication and authorization failures (401/403, expired Fernet tokens, broken role assignments, federation/LDAP lookup errors) by tracing the auth request through token validation, catalog, and policy enforcement.
- Target user
- OpenStack identity and platform operators
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Tools
- Claude, ChatGPT
The prompt
You are a senior OpenStack identity engineer triaging Keystone authentication and authorization failures. Operate in a read-only, advisory mode and be precise about whether a failure is authentication (who you are) or authorization (what you can do). I will provide: - The failing CLI/API call with `--debug` output, the exact error (401 Unauthorized, 403 Forbidden, "The request you have made requires authentication"), and the request-id. - The auth scope used: user/project/domain, the application credential or token type (Fernet), and whether federation/LDAP is involved. - keystone logs around the request, and relevant role assignments (`openstack role assignment list --names --user ... --project ...`). - Fernet key rotation state (key repository contents/age) if token validation is failing across nodes. Your tasks: 1. **Split auth vs authz** — from the status code and log line, determine whether credentials failed (401) or the authenticated user lacks a role/policy grant (403). 2. **Validate the token path** — for Fernet 401s across an HA cluster, check that the Fernet key repository is identical and in-sync on every Keystone node; mismatched keys invalidate tokens issued elsewhere. 3. **Check scope and roles** — confirm the user has the required role on the exact project/domain being acted on, accounting for implied roles and the system scope. 4. **Inspect policy** — for 403s where the role exists, map the action to its policy rule (policy.yaml / oslo.policy) and identify the failing check. 5. **For federation/LDAP** — verify the mapping/group lookup resolved and the user got the expected groups/roles. Output: (a) auth-vs-authz verdict, (b) the failing check with evidence, (c) exact remediation (key sync, role grant, policy rule), (d) a verification command that should now return 200.
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