I had a composer-rest-server running on a host. Due to some reason I had to reboot my aws instance. So I stopped all the fabric docker containers except the chaincode and also stopped the composer rest server.
After rebooting the machine, I restarted all the containers. At this time the chaincode container did not start. However, I issued a ping command with admin identity card and the chaincode container too started.
Next, I restarted the composer rest server with the same admin identity. However, when I tried to issue an "identitiy request" command for a participant it resulted in:
Unhandled error for request POST /api/system/identities/issue: Error: fabric-ca request register failed with errors [[{"code":20,"message":"Authorization failure"}]]
Does it mean the old admin identities are invalidated after a system restart?
This is occurring because when the AWS instance reboots, the identity data within the fabric-ca container is cleared (the container uses sqlite for an ephemeral data store).
If you instead setup the fabric-ca container to use a mysql or postgresql db container, you will be able to persist the identity data even after machine/container restarts.
This question also pertains to your situation as well Hyperledger Composer Identity Issue error after network restart (code:20, authorization failure)