Alright folks, lemme tell you ’bout this kerber vs wozniacki thing I messed around with today. It was a bit of a head-scratcher at first, but I kinda got the hang of it… eventually.

So, first things first, I needed to figure out what the heck Kerberos even was. Googled it, of course. Saw some stuff about authentication and tickets and all that jazz. Sounded kinda complicated, but hey, gotta start somewhere, right?
Next, I decided to set up a basic Kerberos environment. I grabbed a couple of VMs – one for the Kerberos server (KDC) and another for a client. Fired ’em up, installed the necessary packages (krb5-kdc, krb5-admin-server, krb5-client… that sorta stuff).
Then came the config files. Man, those things are dense! *, *… I tweaked ’em based on some tutorials I found online, making sure the realm names matched and the network settings were correct. I remember messing up the realm name initially, and nothing worked. Had to backtrack and fix that.
After the configs were (hopefully) right, I created a Kerberos principal for my client. Used the * tool for that. Added a principal, set a password… felt like I was cracking some kind of super-secret code.
Now, the real test: trying to authenticate from the client machine. I used the `kinit` command, entered the password, and… BAM! Got a ticket! I could see it with `klist`. Felt like a little victory, honestly.

But it didn’t stop there. I wanted to use this authentication for something real. So I set up a simple SSH server on another machine and configured it to use Kerberos authentication. That involved more tweaking of SSH config files (sshd_config, mostly) and making sure the Kerberos realm was recognized.
Finally, I tried SSHing into the server using Kerberos. No password prompt! It just logged me in automatically. That’s when I knew I’d actually gotten it to work. Super cool!
Of course, there were plenty of bumps along the way. Firewall issues, DNS problems, typos in config files… the usual suspects. But hey, that’s how you learn, right?
What I Learned
- Kerberos is powerful stuff, but it can be a pain to set up.
- Read the error messages carefully! They often point you in the right direction.
- Don’t be afraid to experiment and break things. That’s how you figure out how it really works.
So yeah, that’s my Kerberos adventure. It’s definitely something worth learning if you’re serious about security and authentication. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go celebrate with a beer. Cheers!