NIS Works!

I spent a few more minutes on Google tonight looking for reasons why NIS might not work on my home network. I’m still not sure why it didn’t work but I did get it working. On my Fedora 5 client I changed /etc/nsswitch.conf to contain the lines:

passwd: compat
shadow: compat
group: compat

Those lines previously contained:

passwd: files nis
shadow: files nis
group: files nis

I don’t think making this change was the fix, but I can go back and change it to “files nis” again to see if it breaks. I think the real fix was executing yppasswd [username] as root on the NIS client machine. After changing the password I was able to su to that user from another user account and log in from gdm.

I’m glad that battle is over. Now I just have to remember to change the NIS password of user accounts in the future. The next task is to set up an NFS home directory for NIS clients.