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Okay, first off, I know NIS is a turd, but it's what we've got until we do a major migration next year.

Today we had a NIS server outage which predictably prevents user logins. What surprised me was that I was unable to login in as root to any of the impacted machines.

This is our standard /etc/nsswitch.conf

passwd:     files nis
shadow:     files nis
group:      files nis

#hosts:     db files nisplus nis dns
hosts:      files db


bootparams: nisplus [NOTFOUND=return] files

ethers:     files
netmasks:   files
networks:   files
protocols:  files nis
rpc:        files
services:   files nis

netgroup:   files nis nisplus

My understanding is that the system should consult local files then NIS, but this was not what was occurring. Am I missing a setting somewhere that would allow root login regardless of nis state?

jackhamm
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  • Were you not able to login, or was it extremely slow? I have a similar setup, and I can eventually login as root, but it's constantly trying to look for the NIS server when it's down. – greg Jul 02 '15 at 16:46
  • Maybe I didn't wait long enough. It was >5m sitting there. Is that consistent with your experience? – jackhamm Jul 02 '15 at 16:48
  • Yep. It will eventually print some error messages, but you'll eventually be given a password prompt and logged in. After logging in, the best thing to do is to shut off NIS or you'll keep getting the delay. – greg Jul 02 '15 at 17:59

1 Answers1

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The answer to this is that you can't fix it. I checked and as commenters alluded to: the RPC has to hang first; so you could adjust that timing, but you will be waiting no matter what.

jackhamm
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