authconfig seems to insist on adding "nis" to /etc/pam.d/system-auth when you tell RH that you use NIS. This fails miserably when you try to change your local root password obviously, and I'm not sure it actually lets you change any local password anymore for that matter. I've suggested in bug 69546 that authconfig does not add "nis" to the password line for pam_unix That said, I've tried to change a nis password that way: bash-2.05a$ passwd Changing password for user merlin. Changing password for merlin (current) UNIX password: New password: Retype new password: passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully. you'd think it worked, but it failed silently. My password wasn't changed, and if I change it with yppassword, I can change it just fine. That said, the bug wouldn't bother me much if authconfig didn't stick "nis" there in the first place
Created attachment 99502 [details] Make pam change nis and local password The _do_setpass() command in modules/pam_unix/pam_unix_passwd.c will only set the nis password if nis is listed in /etc/pam.d/system-auth. The above patch will change the behavior to also set the local password. One catch is that any possible errors setting the local password are not caught. The patch is against the pam-0.77 code from the Fedora Core 1 src.rpm
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 115309 ***