Network Information Services (NIS and NIS+) Guide

Troubleshooting User Problems

This section describes NIS+ problems that a typical user might encounter. Symptoms include:

• User cannot log in.
• User cannot rlogin to other domain

User Cannot Log In

There are many possible reasons for a user being unable to log in:

• User forgot password. To set up a new password for a user who has forgotten the previous one, run nispasswd for that user on another machine (you have to be the NIS+ administrator to do this).
• Mistyping password. Make sure the user knows the correct password and understands that passwords are case-sensitive and that the letter o is not interchangeable with the numeral 0, nor is the letter l the same as the numeral 1.
• "Login incorrect"-type message. For causes other than simply mistyping the password, see Login Incorrect Message.
• The user's password privileges have expired.
• An inactivity maximum has been set for this user, and the user has exceeded it.

Edit the /etc/security/login.cfg, /etc/security/user, and /usr/lib/security/methods.cfg configuration files. (Add them, if they do not exist.) The following lines must exist (and not be commented) in these files:

NISPLUS
  program=/usr/lib/security/NISPLUS

User Cannot Log In Using New Password

Users who recently changed their password now find they cannot log in at all, or are able to log in on some machines but not on others. Check the following possiilities:

• It may take some time for the new password to propagate through the network. Have users try to log in with the old password.
• The password was changed on a machine that was not running NIS+.

User Cannot Remote Log In to Remote Domain

User tries to rlogin to a machine in some other domain and is refused with a "Permission denied" type of error message. To rlogin to a machine in another domain, a user must have local credentials in that domain.

Run nismatch username.domainname.cred.org_dir in the other domain to see if the user has a LOCAL credential in that domain. If not, do the following:

• Go to the remote domain and use nisaddcred to create a LOCAL credential for the user in that domain.
• Edit the /etc/security/login.cfg, etc/security/user, and /usr/lib/security/methods.cfg files. (Add them, if they do not exist.) The following lines must exist (and not be commented) in these files:

  NISPLUS
    program=/usr/lib/security/NISPLUS
  

User Cannot Change Password

The most common cause of a user being unable to change passwords is that the user is mistyping (or has forgotten) the old password.

Other possible causes are:

• The password Min value has been set to be greater than the password Max value.
• The password is locked or expired. See Login Incorrect Message and Password Locked, Expired, or Terminated.