We've had a number of reports of - and reproduced locally - problems doing GSSAPI authentication on RHEL/CentOS/Fedora machines using the python-kerberos package available from yum.

These problems don't exist using the python-kerberos package in Ubuntu, so this appears to be a Red Hat specific issue.

The workaround is uninstall the python-kerberos package and install pykerberos from pypi using easy_install:

$ sudo easy_install kerberos

or pip:

$ sudo pip install kerberos