Hi All,
Thanks to the following people who provided very useful suggestions
for solving my NIS password woes. Incidentally, this is the first time
that I have used this mailing list and was absolutely thrilled with the
timeliness and effectiveness.
Thanks to:
Claude SOMA - CNTS
Sean O'Connell
Nigel Gall
Steven Johnson
The original message was (partially)
>> Subject: NIS password Problem
>>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I have recently set up NIS on a local domain with
>> a single AlphaServer 2100A and two Linux boxes. The
>> Alpha is the master server. The linux boxes are clients.
>> That is, there is no slave server at this point.
>>
>> I used nissetup to configure the master server, and used
>> the Linux NIS-Howto to manually configure the linux boxes as clients.
>>
>> Alpha=regie5 , two linux boxes = lafite and latour
>>
>> I try now to log into lafite and latour with the new password and
>> it works great, BUT, when I try to log into regie5, the Alpha and
>> master server, it does not recognize that I have a new password,
>> and keeps the old one.
>>
>> I have included the +: symbol at the end of the /etc/passwd file
>> on regie5 (and some variant of this as well on the linux boxes).
>>
All of the people who helped me out suggested that perhaps I had
an entry in the /etc/passwd file on regie5 (the master server) that
was overriding the NIS password. This was certainly on the right
track, although it was a little more involved than that.
When I set NIS up on the master server, I followed the online Digital
instructions and copied the original /etc/passwd file to /var/yp/src/passwd,
removed the root entry, and then used nissetup to configure NIS and build
the maps. When this was finished, I then went back to the /etc/passwd
file and removed those entries which were now in the NIS password database.
I thought this would be enough. However, there is more to do. After
getting the responses, my first thought was that it must be that just changing
the /etc/passwd file wasn't enough, that after doing that one must stop
and restart the NIS daemons. I tried this but nothing changed.
It was Nigel Gall who suggested running passwd (instead of yppasswd) on
my user account and changing to the new NIS password. I tried this, and
it gave me a message that the "hatched password database" or something
like that was screwed up and that I should try running mkpasswd.
I took me a while to figure out that I had to be root to do this. I ran the command
mkpasswd /etc/passwd
and that seemed to "read in" the changed /etc/passwd file and set things into
a reasonable state.
Once this was done, everything worked fine.
The seems to be a reasonably undocumented "feature" in the Digital NIS setup
documentation. Their approach seems to be more one of setting up and NIS server
from scratch, as opposed to changing over from non-NIS to NIS passwords, which
I would imagine is the most common implementation.
Thanks again for the help,
Cheers,
Ed.
--
Dr. Edward J. Brash | email: brash_at_lafite.phys.uregina.ca
Department of Physics | tel. : (306) 585-4201 (office)
University of Regina | tel. : (306) 525-9026 (home)
Regina, SK S4S 0A2 | fax. : (306) 585-4894
Received on Thu Jul 23 1998 - 19:09:49 NZST