GNU/Linux Desktop Survival Guide by Graham Williams
Desktop Survival Project Home Preface Advocacy History Distributions Installation Basic Survival Wajig Audio AbiWord APM Backup Bash Booting Cameras CD Chinese ChRoot Clock Commercial Conference Management Configuration CRON CVS Databases DIA Directories Disks Documentation DVD Email Eye of Gnome Evolution File Systems Firewalls Floppy Disks Fonts Ghemical GIMP Glade Gnome GnuCash Gnumeric GQView Graphics Groups HTML Editors ImageMagick Initialisations on Booting Java KDE Kernels Keyboard Konqueror KVM Switch LaTeX Log System Login Magellan Mathematics Memory Modems Mounting Devices MS/Windows Music MySQL Nautilus Networks NFS NT File System OpenOffice.org Oracle Packages Partitions Passwords PDF Photos PPP Presentations Printing Python R Remote Desktops Rsync Samba Scanning Science Security SH File System Sketch Spell SPlus Spruce SSH SUDO Subversion Swap Themes USB Video Virtualization Web Word X XML Sample Installations Troubleshooting Index

Setting Up The Client

To set up the NIS client on Festival (104.18):

  festival$ wajig install netbase portmap nis

You will be asked the name of the nis domain. You must use the name you supplied to the master server (ktnet). It is stored in /etc/defaultdomain.

Specify the NIS server address in /etc/yp.conf:

  ypserver 192.168.0.4

Restart the client:

  $ wajig restart nis

You can test that the client can access the server with:

  $ ypcat passwd

This should list the users available from the server.

Now edit the passwd, shadow, group and gshadow files. In passwd remove all the users (anyone with a user id in the 1000's) and add:

+::::::

And in shadow:

+::::::::

Then in groups and gshadow files, similarly remove the users and add:

+:::

NIS should now be working. Certainly ypcat passwd should show the users in NIS.

When adding a new user, add the user on the server (with adduser) and then you may need to rerun /usr/lib/yp/ypinit -m, or perhaps it is make -C /var/yp.