Is it necessary to assign hostname to slave KDC in small letters for KDC propagation?

Ken Raeburn raeburn at MIT.EDU
Wed Apr 23 11:56:10 EDT 2008


On Apr 23, 2008, at 11:26, Ken Raeburn wrote:
> DNS is not case-sensitive.  Kerberos requires a single, fixed binary  
> encoding of a name -- that is, the spelling of the name is case- 
> sensitive.  The Kerberos library will take the name supplied and  
> convert it to lowercase.  So you can tell your host its name in  
> whatever case you want, and you can enter it into DNS using whatever  
> case you want (the two need not match), but the Kerberos service  
> principal names must use the lowercase form (and, obviously, need  
> not match the other two).

I've been reminded privately that there may be cases where other  
implementations don't always behave this way.  The *MIT*  
implementation does follow the RFC spec in this, and will always use  
lowercase host names.

There are also cases having to do with new specifications in the works  
where, depending on a site's configuration, getting the case exactly  
correct may be less critical.  Again, at the moment, that doesn't  
really affect the MIT implementation.

Ken



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