NIS: problems when changing passwords

Good morning all,

I have had some problems with getting NIS working on a small testbed
server system, and finally had some success in resolving my problems
this morning.

Although these answers are probably obvious to any experienced *nix'er,
they might be of some assistance to other NIS newbies like me:

I'm running a Red Hat 9.0 server with ypserv, yppasswdd and ypbind.

The problems I was experiencing was that any attempt to change a user
password was met with:

[root@vlamp temp]# passwd tempuser
Changing password for user tempuser.
New password:
BAD PASSWORD: it is based on a dictionary word
Retype new password:
RPC: Can't encode arguments
The password has not been changed on vlamp.

or

[root@vlamp temp]# yppasswd tempuser
Changing NIS account information for tempuser on vlamp.
Please enter root password:
Changing NIS password for tempuser on vlamp.
Please enter new password:
Please retype new password:
Error while changing the NIS password.
The NIS password has not been changed on vlamp.

Eventually I got around this problem by ensuring that users are always
added with a default password:

# useradd -p password username

After this is done, yppasswd works successfully.

The other thing that tripped me up was not initialising the NIS database
*before* trying to use it:

# /usr/lib/yp/ypinit -m

Hope this is helpful to someone!

-- GuruJ.