/etc/hosts on a Kerberos client - Please provide your advise.

[Sam Hartman]

[A lot of people dropped from the cc list; feel free to forward but I
don't think you'll want to.]

Hi.  You seem to be looking for an authoritative statement from the
MIT Kerberos Team on whether a particular configuration is supported
in order to handle a dispute with a third-party application vendor.

Nothing we are going to say is going to be that authoritative.  We're
distributing and developing open-source software.  May I remind you of
the following text from our license:

 M.I.T. makes no representations about the suitability of this software
 for any purpose.  It is provided "as is" without express or implied
 warranty.

 THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
 IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
 WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.


We're quite serious about that.  MIT Kerberos comes with no
warranties; we don't support it at all except what support we offer
over mailing lists like this one in our spare time.


I could tell you that yes, your configuration should work fine; I
believe that to be true based on my knowledge.  But I could be wrong
because of some corner case.  Nothing I tell you is going to be more
meaningful than running the tests and seeing if your configuration
works.

I can certainly tell you that the documentation Oracle refers to on
our web page is intended to give a configuration that happens to work,
not to enumerate the set of possible working configurations.

But it seems like you're looking for some sort of official statement
of support, like you might get from Oracle through some support
contract.  You don't have a support contract with us; we are an
educational institution and don't offer such contracts.  We aren't
interested in any liability that might come with making such official
statements or in getting involved between two vendors in specific
support issues.


If you want to pay someone to support MIT Kerberos, I think that
you'll find people willing to sell you high quality support for our
product.  We do have a webpage that lists people who claim to offer
support for Kerberos.  I'm sure that if you had such a support
contract, you could get an official statement on whether your Kerberos
implementation supports your configuration.

I am sorry that I cannot be of more help.

--Sam