Slow response with multiple KDCs

petesea@bigfoot.com petesea at bigfoot.com
Mon Sep 18 17:15:41 EDT 2006


My Kerberos admins recently changed all the KDCs in our realm and started 
distributing a new standard krb5.conf file.  Now... instead of taking < 1 
sec to get a password prompt from "kinit", it takes 40-50 secs.

The old file lists 6 KDCs using IP addresses instead of hostnames.  The 
new file lists 10 KDCs using hostnames... so obviously it has something to 
do with DNS.

Using krb5-1.4.4, and running strace on kinit, it appears to be doing 
multiple DNS requests for EVERY KDC listed in the krb5.conf file.  This 
seems to be why it takes so long.  In fact... it looks like for 10 KDCs, 
"kinit" ends up making 316 DNS requests.

Why does it make so many requests?  Why does it make DNS requests for ALL 
the KDCs even if the first one returned results.  Is this a function of 
the kerberos library itself or something else?

I've tried setting the following in krb5.conf, but they don't seem to make 
a difference:

   dns_lookup_realm = false
   dns_lookup_kdc = false
   dns_fallback = false

I've also tried 1.4.3 compiled WITHOUT --disable-dns-for-realm and 1.4.4 
compiled WITH --disable-dns-for-realm, but that didn't make a difference 
either.

PS. The reason I'm concerned about this is because I need to build a new 
krb5-1.4.4 package to be distributed to all our developers that contains 
the new krb5.conf file.  I don't want to get a bunch of users telling me 
how slow kinit has become.



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