From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.79 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.18-10 i686) Description of problem: passwd tries to change the password in the NIS passwd database, even when the /etc/nsswitch.conf entry for passwd is set to files only. The end result is that no users can change their passwords on the local machine if their login name exists in the NIS database. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Configure a machine with NISDOMAIN set and with passwd in nsswitch.conf set to files only 2.Create a user on the local machine with a login name identical to an existing NIS login name 3.Login as that user on the local machine and try to change the password on that local machine using the passwd command Actual Results: It is impossible to change the local password because the passwd command tries to change the password of the NIS login with the same name Expected Results: The local password should have been changed. Additional info: In 7.3, the permissions of /usr/bin/yppasswd are now 500, whereas they used to be 555 in previous RedHat versions. It appears that someone is trying to phaseout the yppasswd command by having passwd do an intelligent guess as to what password should be changed. However, if that is the case, when nsswitch.conf has passwd set to files only, then passwd should not be invoking yppasswd.
Password changing is not affected by /etc/nsswitch.conf but by the nis option of the pam_unix.so module in the /etc/pam.d/system-auth file. The problem of changing NIS password when an user is in the local passwd file is fixed in the current Fedora Core release. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 43915 ***