Troubleshooting Kerberos Configuration

When using Kerberos, it is import to use fully-qualified domain names and not use localhost. Please ensure that the fully qualified hostname of each server is used in the following locations:

conf/zookeeper.properties file should use FQDN for server.1, server.2, …, server.N values.
The Connect String property of the ZooKeeperStateProvider
The /etc/hosts file should also resolve the FQDN to an IP address that is not 127.0.0.1.

Failure to do so, may result in errors similar to the following:


         2016-01-08 16:08:57,888 ERROR [pool-26-thread-1-SendThread(localhost:2181)] o.a.zookeeper.client.ZooKeeperSaslClient An error: (java.security.PrivilegedActionException: javax.security.sasl.SaslException: GSS initiate failed [Caused by GSSException: No valid credentials provided (Mechanism level: Server not found in Kerberos database (7) - LOOKING_UP_SERVER)]) occurred when evaluating Zookeeper Quorum Member's  received SASL token. Zookeeper Client will go to AUTH_FAILED state.

One of the most important notes in the above Troubleshooting guide is the mechanism for turning on Debug output for Kerberos. This is done by setting the sun.security.krb5.debug environment variable. In NiFi, this is accomplished by adding the following line to the $NIFI_HOME/conf/bootstrap.conf file:


         java.arg.16=-Dsun.security.krb5.debug=true

This will cause the debug output to be written to the NiFi Bootstrap log file. By default, this is located at $NIFI_HOME/logs/nifi-bootstrap.log. This output can be rather verbose but provides extremely valuable information for troubleshooting Kerberos failures.