I just had a strange insident. A user came by complaining that he couldn't log into one of our linux boxes. All of them use NIS which is served from an SGI system running IRIX 5.3. I tried doing an su - username and got the error that the username was not a valid one.(the extact text of the mssage was "su: user username does not exist") But it did work on the other linux boxes. I then restarted ypbind (i.e. cd /etc/rc.d/init.d ./ypbind restart ) and the su command worked. Before doing the ypbind restart, I did try out one other account and the su into that account did work. If this happens again, is there a better way of diagnosing the problem? Steve.
ypbind takes a while (~1min) to detect that an NIS server is down and to connect to another one, and then if and only if the /etc/yp.conf permits broadcasting for a certain domain