Aggressive kinit timeouts

[Jonathan Maron]

> On Aug 7, 2018, at 10:15 AM, Greg Hudson <ghudson at mit.edu> wrote:
> 
> Please use kerberos at mit.edu for operational questions like this.  For simplicity I will go ahead and answer here.
> 
> On 08/07/2018 06:46 AM, Jonathan Maron wrote:
>>   We have an LDAP realm setup that doesn’t communicate with a local LDAP DB, but rather goes through a number of gateways to access a remote LDAP resource.  This introduces some latency that at times exceeds 1 second.  That appears to be an issue - we often see authentication failures, possibly since the order of responses for repeated AS_REQ may be out of order?  Anyhow, we are definitely seeing auth failures, and the 1 second timeout appears to play a role.
> 
> I'm not sure how out-of-order responses could account for the problem. After one second, the client retransmits or tries a different KDC, but neither request should result in a failure.
> 
>>   We are unfortunately still using version 1.10.  Has this issue been addressed in subsequent versions?  Is the 1 second timeout now configurable?
> 
> It's not configurable, but as of 1.12, if you use TCP, the client waits ten seconds before moving on if the KDC accepts the TCP connection within one second.  You can use "udp_preference_limit = 0" in [libdefaults] to force the initial use of TCP.

We’ve updated our client (kinit) to version 1.16.1 and do see the behavior you describe.  We are noticing some issues with the KDC appearing not to accept TCP connections?  Could this be due to the version discrepancy (client 1.16, server 1.10) and the change to TCP connection acceptance behavior in 1.13?