samba - Dec 2006 - Heimdal or MIT kerberos comparison

What is the difference between Heimdal and MIT as far usability goes?
MIT seems to be the default on major linux distrobutions, but I here a
lot about people preferring Heimdal, but I can't find any reasons why.
Is one generally more stable/faster/reliable than the other?

 

There is already a blank wiki page at
http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_%26_Kerberos so if anyone has any
good information, I'll put it there.

 

James Dinkel

Network Engineer

Butler County of Kansas

 

There are 10 types of people in the world:  those who understand binary,
and those who don't.

On Fri, 2006-12-22 at 10:23 -0600, James A. Dinkel
wrote:
> What is the difference between Heimdal and MIT as far usability goes?
> MIT seems to be the default on major linux distrobutions, but I here a
> lot about people preferring Heimdal, but I can't find any reasons why.
> Is one generally more stable/faster/reliable than the other?
The biggest thing users will notice is that the error message system
returns contextual errors, with the actual reason for the failure, not
just the translated code.  It often includes the vital clues that help
fix up the inevitable kerberos issues.

I've use Heimdal in Samba4, particularly because of the close working
relationship I have with it's primary maintainer.

Andrew Bartlett

-- 
Andrew Bartlett                                http://samba.org/~abartlet/
Authentication Developer, Samba Team           http://samba.org
Samba Developer, Red Hat Inc.                  http://redhat.com
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Bartlett
> Sent: Saturday, December 23, 2006 3:42 PM
> 
> The biggest thing users will notice is that the error message system
> returns contextual errors, with the actual reason for the failure, not
> just the translated code.  It often includes the vital clues that help
> fix up the inevitable kerberos issues.
> 
> I've use Heimdal in Samba4, particularly because of the close working
> relationship I have with it's primary maintainer.
> 
> Andrew Bartlett
Is this "close working relationship" true of the entire Samba team (or
at least of anyone involved in coding anything related to Kerberos)?
Samba's "Authentication Developer"'s preference of Heimdal
over MIT is
good enough for me, but I would like to put some accurate information in
the wiki, as it pertains to Samba users.  I went ahead and added a blurb
to this page: http://wiki.samba.org/index.php/Samba_%26_Kerberos since
this is the only feedback I've gotten thus far.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew Bartlett [mailto:abartlet@samba.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, December 26, 2006 4:38 PM
> 
> It's a Samba4 thing, because we bundle kerberos in the distribution.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> Almost all users will use the system kerberos libraries, whatever they
> are.  They tend to be difficult to replace.
> 
> Andrew Bartlett
The only thing is, I think Ubuntu/Debian and CentOS can use either one,
although I think MIT is the "standard" (which is what I used).  I
edited
the wiki page.  Anyway, thanks for all the info!