NIS password update problem

[Jay Kianos]

I'm having a problem setting user passwords on my NIS master. Whenever I do

passwd

it comes back and asks me for the Old NIS Password. As root on the master, it should let me do this without asking for the old password. This has worked correctly for a long time and just started to act up.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated. The NIS server is running HPUX 10.20.

[Shannon Petry]

This is because your path is not properly setup.

echo $PATH should show that /bin is before /usr/bin with the root user.

If the path was setup properly, root would run the binary /bin/passwd and no old NIS password would be required.

root is obviously running /usr/bin/passwd which will call yppasswd on detection of NIS.

To test this, try the following:

as root

/bin/passwd

/usr/bin/passwd

/usr/bin/yppasswd

If you need to keep your path setup with /usr/bin ahead of /bin, then use the absolute path of the passwd program root should be using when changing users passwords.
E.G.
/bin/passwd

Regards,
Shannon

[Jay Kianos]

No luck on using /bin/passwd either. It still asks for the old NIS passwd.

[Shannon Petry · Accepted solution]

My bad, in haste I wrote /bin for root instead of /sbin.


root's path should have /sbin first.

run /sbin/passwd and your problem will go away.

Sorry for the oops!
Regards,
Shannon

[Jay Kianos]

Nope - no luck with /sbin/passwd either, still asking for Old NIS password.

[Shannon Petry]

Check the sizes then of /sbin/passwd and /bin/passwd. They should be very different.

ll /sbin/passwd
-r-sr-xr-x 1 root bin 229376 Nov 7 1997 /sbin/passwd

ll /usr/bin/passwd
-r-sr-xr-x 5 root bin 49152 Apr 9 1998 /usr/bin/passwd

The size of /bin/passwd should match the one in /usr/bin.

/sbin/passwd is a statically compiled program, hence much larger.

Permissions as root should not matter.

I wonder if someone tampered with your system?

Regards,
Shannon

[Jack Magilsen]

This helped me out ..please assign more points :)