Ways to Administer Kerberos Principals and Policies

The Kerberos database on the master KDC contains all of your realm's Kerberos principals, their passwords, policies, and other administrative information. To create and delete principals, and to modify their attributes, you can use either the kadmin or gkadmin command.

The kadmin command provides an interactive command-line interface that enables you to maintain Kerberos principals, policies, and keytab files. There are two versions of the kadmin command:

• kadmin – Uses Kerberos authentication to operate securely from anywhere on the network

• kadmin.local – Must be run directly on the master KDC

Other than kadmin using Kerberos to authenticate the user, the capabilities of the two versions are identical. The local version is necessary to enable you to set up enough of the database so that you can use the remote version.

Also, the Oracle Solaris release provides the SEAM Tool, gkadmin, which is an interactive graphical user interface (GUI) that provides essentially the same capabilities as the kadmin command. See SEAM Tool for more information.