Description of problem:

"man nsswitch.conf" says:

       An  example /etc/nsswitch.conf (namely, the default used when /etc/nss-
       witch.conf is missing):

       passwd:         compat
       group:          compat
       shadow:         compat

This used to work in FC4, but somewhere along the line libnss_compat seems to
have been changed so that this fails if the NIS service is currently down.  This
means a load of the boot scripts (such as the one that starts udev) emit errors
such as "root: no such user" because they are executed before NIS comes up.  You
now need to write something like:

       passwd:         compat [NOTFOUND=return] files
       group:          compat [NOTFOUND=return] files
       shadow:         compat [NOTFOUND=return] files

so (unless this is a bug in glibc) I suggest the documentation be changed to match.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
man-pages-2.21-1
glibc-2.4-8