Hi Steve,
I'm not sure if I understand exactly what's happening but it sound's like a
DNS issue. The records FreeIPA/IdM needs are fairly extensive. you can print them out with
the following command:
ipa dns-update-system-records --dry-run
You might need to go through and systematically add those entries to get discovery to
work. One issue may be that Kerberos relies on all those SRV entries with underscores for
discovery, and I'm not sure if /etc/hosts supports SRV records.
Best,
Owen