ping for kdc utility?

[Tom Yu]

Wang Shouhua <shouhuaw at gmail.com> writes:

> On 2 April 2014 21:46, Benjamin Kaduk <kaduk at mit.edu> wrote:
>> On Wed, 2 Apr 2014, Wang Shouhua wrote:
>>
>>> Is there such an utility which can issue a "ping" (null command) to
>>> the kdc to see if it is still responding?
>>
>>
>> I'm not aware of a dedicated utility.  However, the KDC is basically a
>> stateless UDP service, so recording a live transaction and replaying an
>> input packet is expected to yield some sort of response packet.  Doing this
>> periodically allows for a very primitive "liveness check" which can be used
>> in some monitoring setups.  Of course, if one wants to monitor that the KDC
>> is actually functioning properly and not just spewing error packets, more
>> effort is required.
>
> Does the Kerberos5 core protocol have a 'null' operation?

It does not, unless you count correctly formatted yet invalid KDC-REQs
that can elicit KRB-ERROR messages.  If you don't count that, could
you describe why having a null operation is important for your
purposes?