Computers

Wierd and wonderful Kerberos Errors

Got called out last night because most of our services stopped letting people in.

Kerberos was giving the wonderful error: "Server's entry in database has expired" when you tried to get a ticket. Sometimes this is caused by the date/time on servers going squiff. This time it wasn't. Since my Google foo failed me and a member of the MIT Kerberos team saved me a lot of digging I thought I'd put this out on the interwebs.

The actual error code gives slightly more of a hint "KRB5KDC_ERR_SERVICE_EXP"

The message was referring to the Ticket Granting Service principal having expired ie. krbtgt/REALM@REALM (eg krbtgt/EXAMPLE.COM@EXAMPLE.COM)

It would appear that one of my colleagues (who apparently at this point can retire whenever he wants) didn't expect to still be here when he initially set up the service... Remove the expiry and hey presto everything works again, just like magic.


Having just fired up wireshark when tlyu gave me the answer and then not closed it when I left. I'm amused to see that I might not have been quite as far from finding the answer as I thought... Just below the line I'd started to examine

Server Name (Unknown) : krbtgt/OURREALM
Academic

Training

A month or so back I was supposed to be going on a Red Hat training course in London (RHS429) unfortunately this got cancelled as only 2 people had registered.  (They need 4 to make it financially viable)

I was then booked onto the next one, in Farnborough this time, which was supposed to be next week.  Didn't get the cancellation notice because of a balls up.  But also didn't get a confirmation message.  So I contacted the reseller (Kelway) to check what's going on, they then chase it up for me and very apologetically get back to me and tell me that it's been cancelled because again there's only two people registered, but they'll see what they can do since this wasn't the first time they'd cancelled this course, and I wasn't available for the June course.

So yesterday they ring me back, they're going to run the course after all, with just one candidate, me!  The person from Kelway even rang round the various hotels in Farnborough to see what the best deal they could get for me was.
Building

Perl

In the middle of writing some perl test cases for code I've been writing (Trying to avoid writing the rest of the documentation)

Failed 4/15 test scripts, 73.33% okay. -2/719 subtests failed, 100.28% okay.
fireworks

Meep Meep, VROOM!

Hmm so since I last posted...
  • Past driving test!
  • Acquired Car
  • Been to Sundown
  • Been playing with Spacewalk
  • Discovered CentOS do some rather broken things with their build system... Two packages, same name, different signiture
  • Got sent freebie from RedHat for contributing to Spacewalk
Smlle

Woot! Theory Test passed

Well I started learning to drive back in February, passed by theory test yesterday, got one question wrong (couldn't remember which hours it's illegal to sound your horn in a built up area)

Now to book the practical...
fireworks

Consultation

Con⋅sul⋅ta⋅tion  (kän′səl tās̸hən)

Noun

A process by which you waste the time of the people who will actually be affected, asking for their opinions, when in actuality you will just impose your will on them anyway.
fireworks

Belfast

I seem to have ended up in Belfast for 2 weeks as a lampie.

Flew out on Monday, unfortunately Shevek's post does far too good a job of describing how the first 3 days went. Last couple of days haevn't gone too badly, although we're being given naff all information about what's actually going to happen and when, when which makes life interesting.

Ah well. The event actually kicks off tomorrow. Last night was the first decent nights sleep I've had all week.