The kerberos clarifications and other best practices recommend against the use of TXT records for hostname to realm mapping. In MIT krb5 This is controlled by the dns_lookup_realm setting, which is false by default.

However there is no such recommendation against the use of DNS SRV records to lookup the KDC for a realm. This is controlled by the dns_lookup_kdc setting, and defaults to true. 

In fact it is best deployment practice to use DNS for looking KDC information. Doing so allows clients not to need configuration to use a kerberos realm, and subsequent manual reconfiguration when the realm changes. In addition using DNS its easy to failover between KDC's.

The current krb5-libs package installs an /etc/krb5.conf that sets dns_lookup_kdc = false. It seems this may have been done accidentally, conflating the security issues of dns_lookup_realm with dns_lookup_kdc.

In any case, I'd like to request this be changed and the default value for dns_lookup_realm be used.

I'm working on UI for streamlining the setup of kerberos on Fedora and RHEL. We would change option unconditionally during setup anyway. So doing it in the package allows us to save work and have a krb5 that just works out of the box as intended by upstream.

Attaching a patch to git://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/krb5.git.