It's very common to keep the text files that are used to generate the NIS maps in a separate directory (ie. not using the standard /etc files). On a master NIS server, it will then be necessary to run yppasswdd with additional arguments that tell it where to find the passwd and shadow files. My current solution on Red Hat 7.0 is to add this to /etc/sysconfig/network: YPPASSWDD_ARGS="-D /var/yp/etc" and to modify the /etc/rc.d/init.d/yppasswd rc script to pass that env variable, thus: daemon rpc.yppasswdd $YPPASSWDD_ARGS
added now for the next rpm Thanks, Florian La Roche