NIS question

[Jeremy Primer]

In article <1990Dec7.022705.8901 at wdl1.wdl.loral.com> rob at wdl50.wdl.fac.com (Rob Riepel) writes:

>I'm currently taking the SunOS system admin class and we were told that there
>is a bug in rpc.yppasswdd that prevents it from doing the automatic update of
>the passwd map.

I don't know whether Sun has volunteered the explanation for this bug, so for
the record, here is what I observed while trying to get yppasswdd to work.

Our rc.local line prior to SunOS 4.1 was 'rpc.yypasswdd /etc/passwd -m'.

I figured the problem might be something amiss in the make in /var/yp.  I
observed that /var/yp/Makefile builds target "k" instead of target "all" by
default, and that target "k" simply reruns make with the -k option, telling
make to attempt successive targets even if some fail.  Thus inspired, I tried
yppasswdd as:

rpc.yypasswdd /etc/passwd -m -k passwd

and it worked.  The question remained: what were the errors which -k
convinced make to ignore?  yppasswdd had to be invoking make incorrectly.  So
I changed my NIS password and then immediately ran 'ps ax | grep passwd' in
another window and saw:

   64 ?  S     0:00 rpc.yppasswdd /etc/passwd -m -k passwd
28027 ?  S     0:00 rpc.yppasswdd /etc/passwd -m -k passwd
28028 ?  S     0:00 sh -c make rpc.yppasswdd /etc/passwd -m -k passwd
28029 ?  S     0:00 make rpc.yppasswdd /etc/passwd -m -k passwd
28043 pd S     0:00 grep passwd

The -k option convinces make to work even though it has been passed some
inappropriate arguments.  It seems that there are other workarounds which
cause rpc.yppasswdd to invoke make properly.
--
Jeremy Primer, Department of Mathematics, 1 Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138
primer at math.harvard.edu     ...!harvard!zariski!primer    primer at huma1.bitnet