I've not yet resolved this problem with kinit, but my debugging
skills are getting more sophisticated :-)

Problem:

porter% kinit glc5
NetBSD Kerberos (porter)
Kerberos Initialization for "glc5"
kinit: Password incorrect

I checked with tcpdump, and kinit is happily chatting with the remote
kerberos server. So, I ktraced the above command. The interesting bit
is:

 15290 kinit    NAMI  "/dev/tty"
 15290 kinit    RET   open 3
 15290 kinit    CALL  ioctl(0x3,TIOCGETP,0xefbfbba8)
 15290 kinit    RET   ioctl -1 errno 25 Inappropriate ioctl for device

So, I looked up error 25 in errno.h, and it's ENOTTY.

man ioctl shows:

     [ENOTTY]      d is not associated with a character special device.

     [ENOTTY]      The specified request does not apply to the kind of object
                   that the descriptor d references.

The first case is right out, as /dev/tty is a character device. (Yes, I've
tried MAKEDEV'ing it. I even echoed some text to /dev/tty to make sure
that it works, and it does.). So that leaves the second error. Grepping
for TIOCGETP shows up in ioctl_compat.h, and that's where my comprehension
of things stops. The only salient line is:

#define TIOCGETP        _IOR('t', 8,struct sgttyb)/* get parameters -- gtty */

Can anyone tell me what's going on ? :-)

Oh yeah, this is on vanilla 1.3.

--
George L. Coulouris - http://www.tc.cornell.edu/~glc5/
NetBSD 1.3 - free, multiplatform unix. http://www.netbsd.org/