System Administration Guide: Security Services

Problems Authenticating as root

If authentication fails when you try to become superuser on your system and you have already added the root principal to your host's keytab file, there are two potential problems to check. First, make sure that the root principal in the keytab file has a fully qualified host name as its instance. If it does, check the /etc/resolv.conf file to make sure that the system is correctly set up as a DNS client.