This setup is very straightforward in Linux but a little bit complicated in Windows. This is because of how packages are managed and installed in Windows. In this article, we shall discuss “How to install Kerberos packages via Cygwin in Windows”. Ansible Tower is the enterprise offering from Ansible that provides a GUI self-service interface, REST API access, and other centralized management features including Active Directory support. However, Installing and configuring Ansible Tower in the Ubuntu Server is pretty straightforward.

For the Windows installation of Kerberos, it was not officially listed in the link below how to install it.

This is an absolutely vital part of Ansible configuration, which ensures effective communication between the Ansible control server and target serves (Kerberos authentication enables you to authenticate against these domain-joined devices easily.

Furthermore, Ansible uses the Pywinrm package to communicate with Windows servers over WinRM. It is not installed by default with the Ansible package.

Install the Pywinrm module

On the Ansible server, install the “pywinrm” python module to support WinRM protocol. I already installed the package because I installed the entire Python packages (dependencies). If you have not done so, use any of the commands below.

$ pip install "pywinrm>=0.3.0"
or
$ pip install pywinrm

Install Kerberos package

Kerberos supports Cygwin and here are the various steps to install it. Below are some steps (3) on how to install Kerberos on Windows.

Via the Cygwin GUI

Kerberos can be installed via the Cygwin GUI as shown below. Run the Kerberos setup as shown below.

Select (“krb5-workstation”: Kerberos reference implementation clients) and Install.

Via the terminal

Once other dependencies have been installed. The python-Kerberos wrapper can be installed using pip, as shown below.

pip install pywinrm[Kerberos]

Via the “apt-cyg” command, as shown below.

When installed, to tell the right location of the packages, simply search for “krb5” as shown below “C:\cygwin64\etc\crypto-policies\back-ends”.

Moreover, Navigate through this path ‘C:\cygwin64\etc\crypto-policies\back-ends” via the Cygwin Terminal to access the krb5.config file as shown below.

Next, we will be configuring Kerberos to work.

I hope you found this blog post helpful on “How to install Kerberos packages via Cygwin in Windows”. Please let me know in the comment section if you have any questions.