Re: Best practices inquiry: tracking SSH host keys

[Shumon Huque <shuque () isc upenn edu>]

On Fri, Jul 07, 2006 at 10:18:35AM -0400, David Nolan wrote:
> --On Thursday, July 06, 2006 18:22:48 -0700 Jeremy Chadwick 
> <nanog () jdc parodius com> wrote:
>
> > Speaking purely from a system administration point of view, Kerberos
> > is also a nightmare.  Not only does the single-point-of-failure
> > induce red flags in most SAs I know (myself included),
>
> If a deployed kerberos environment has a single point of failure then its 
> been deployed poorly.  Kerberos has replication mechanisms to provide 
> redundancy.  The only think you can't replicate in K5 is the actual master, 
> meaning that if the master is down you can't change passwords, create 
> users, etc.  While thats a single point of failure its not typically a 
> real-time critical one.

Furthermore, it isn't impossible to design a multi-master Kerberos 
service. I can think of a number of designs, but it would have to
be done carefully. I've heard people talking about this in the
past, but I haven't yet seen any implementations.

--Shumon.