Kerberos Fully qualified domain name

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I'm currently looking to configure a Kerberos V realm and wondering about the risk of having systems in my environment that are not in FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name). A lot of my search mention to use FQDN but doesn't mention what are the risk of not being in FQDN.

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Fred the Magic Wonder Dog On

It's not exactly a risk in the security sense, but it will create much confusion in configuring various clients and servers.

Kerberos depends on the ability of the client and server to agree on the service name to be used by some process that is outside the kerberos protocol. In other words if I want to use kerberos telnet to some host, I need to know in advance what service principal that host is using in it's /etc/krb5.keytab. There is no way in the kerberos protocol for the client to learn this.

By default kerberos clients usually do a gethostbyname, then gethostbyaddr on the ip address returned and then use that hostname to construct a service principal. This is where you will run into problems. You might try turning off DNS canonicalization altogether ( it's an option in krb5.conf ).

There is also the problem of default realm based on hostname, but that's a much simpler one to solve using values in /etc/krb5.conf.