> Jay, I don't know why you think that smack 4 only supports gssapi. I can see e.g. here several other supported auths: http://www.igniterealtime.org/builds/smack/docs/4.0.6/javadoc/org/jivesoftware/smack/sasl/SASLMechanism.html
i apologize - i meant that smack 4 only supports sasl auth. non-sasl (a.k.a. simple) auth works, but is not available in smack 4.
where do you see the other supported auths? and how would i switch between them? (neither of us are java devs so it's a little bit challenging for us to grok java api docs)
> Also, I don't understand why you keep pressing this issue so much. I thought you had figured out a way to authenticate even with the latest version?
almost, but not quite. we found a manual way to authenticate, and the jenkins user would only be auth'd as long as the kerb ticket is valid. effectively, this means we need to manually authenticate the jenkins user once a day, which isn't acceptable. so really, we found a crummy workaround, but this doesn't resolve this bug report, and we're not entirely sure why or how our workaround solves the issue, or if it's really just a band-aid over a different problem.
personally, i don't believe the behavior described in this bug report ("gss.conf not found" exception) matches the expected behavior for this plugin (if i've supplied my jabber id and password to the jabber plugin, it should have all the information it needs - why is it complaining about something called "gss.conf"?).
> And again: the smack forum would be a better place to ask about xmpp/smack authentication details!
okay, i accept that this may be an upstream issue, but it seems to me that this kind of error shouldn't bubble up to the downstream consumer... i shouldn't need to know anything about gssapi in order to auth to an xmpp server through a jenkins plugin. i feel like that's really the crux of the issue.
kutzi, thanks for your time and help with this issue. i hope my little diatribe here clarifies why we keep bugging you 
I'm not using the plugin currently. When I used it last time several month ago, I didn't need to configure a gss.conf file.