Is there a way to steer kinit to a specific kdc?

[Ken Hornstein]

>It *looks* like, in order to check basically fakes this out with a 
>krb5.conf that only includes a single KDC (the one being tested).
>
>Is that really the best way to go about it?
>
>Can neither mit kinit nor the heimdal one supplied with BSD systems by 
>default, not just be forced to a single KDC?

You are correct; there's no easier way to go about it.  At least for
MIT Kerberos you could write a "locate" plugin that provided some way
of specifying server locations.  That would probably be worse than just
writing out a custom krb5.conf.  As a practical matter I could see it
being challenging to design a good API to do that and it would probably
have limited use.  I feel your pain because there are a number of
times when I specifically contact a single KDC for testing/development
purposes and I also just edit krb5.conf.  FWIW, there are many times
when I want to do some testing and send a TGS-REQ to a particular KDC
and that would involve not just having a modified kinit, so I think
the problem is more complex than it appears.

--Ken