Error: "kadmin: Communication failure with server while initializing kadmin interface."

Solution Unverified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5

Issue

Running kadmin on a client system produces the following failure:

# kadmin -p root/admin
kadmin: Communication failure with server while initializing kadmin interface

Resolution

Looking at the krb5.conf file revealed a typo in the following section:

[realms]
 SERVER119.EXAMPLE.COM = {
  kdc = 192.168.0.119:88 
  admin_server = 192.168.0.119::749      <------------- Here we can see the double "::" when it should be only one ":"
  default_domain = example.com
 }

Fixing that solved the issue.

Diagnostic Steps

To diagnose that we checked:
1. kdc.conf, kadm5.acl files located in /var/kerberos/krb5kdc/ directory for misconfiguration.
2. Doublechecked the entries in the /etc/hosts files on the server and the client.
3. Made sure that we have the correct host name (IP_addr) for the master KDC in krb5.conf file.
4. Made sure that kadmind is running on the master KDC.

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