I'll answer myself since I found out what the problem was. Since I "inherited" this cluster I am not aware of all the things that have been done on it. I've found out that on the node that hosts the Cloudera Manager and some of the other the JCE was manually installed. So what I did was to manually install JCE on the other nodes that were missing the library (it's a very simple procedure, you just have to copy two jars in the java home). Then the Kerberos installation was smooth sailing like the other times I did it. I think that maybe the CM should have a way to indicate a situation like this and not hang forever leaving the user completely unaware of what is happening. In my case I was lucky that I could ssh into the nodes and investigate about the issue. ... View more