HP-UX NIS Interoperability with IRIX

[William E. Sisson, Jr.]

I have stood up an HP-UX NIS master. As such it runs yppasswdd to receive password updates from the clients. On my IRIX clients, I have "compat" mode set in the nsswitch.conf file so that I can use "+" entries to selectively add users to each system. Similarly, I can customize each users home directory/shell/etc.. based on which system they are on. Unfortunately, when I run yppasswd from the IRIX boxes it updates the NIS server with the new password plus the other information that is part of the "+" entry on the NIS client. This is a bad thing. I don't know if this is SGI's problem or if its HPs problem, but it doesn't seem to do this when both the client and the server are IRIX or HP-UX. Has anyone else seen this behavior ?

[Brian Hackley]

Hello,
This kind of problem awakens a old brain cell from a similar kind of problem I worked on many moons ago on HPUX 10.20. What you might want to do is check the 10.20 NFS/NIS (runtime) patch and 11.0 ONC patch level on the HP's in question and see if any changes or fixes have been made to yppasswdd and/or passwd. Other things I would do is get a nettl trace to see if the client actually sends the "+" in the password update to the NIS Server. I don't believe that it should be sent to the NIS Server yppasswdd!! Do you see the same issue with a Sun box?
I don't know if this helps or not,
-> Brian Hackley

[William E. Sisson, Jr.]

Brian,
Thanks for the info. The SGI doesn't actually send the "+" character, but it sends the GECOS field, Home Directory Field, and Shell Field. I think this is a problem with SGIs implementation of yppasswd. I haven't tried a Solaris system yet, but an OpenBSD 2.7 client seems to work fine with the HP-UX 11 NIS master.