Validating NIS before committing it?

I'm trying to automate some NIS features for a client, and one of the
things she wants is to know if the domain one of *her* clients enters is
valid before she sets the NIS domain and configures NIS servers for that
client.

Is there a way to test if a set of NIS settings is working? Could I do
something like:

ypcat -d <proposed domain> passwd

And test the return code (or perhaps any returned error messages), or is
that not reliable?

Elf