[Linux-disciples] Ownership weirdness related to NIS

[Stephen R Laniel]

I had a very frustrating day trying to get a client's Linux
and Mac machines working with one another. They're all using
NIS, including the Macs, so there should be no problems with
the usernames; the usernames all come out of one NIS server.
Yet for instance, when I tried to set the owner of a file
on one client to 'root:admins' (where I had defined 'admins'
on the NIS server and had propagated the changes to all the
clients), then did an 'ls', it appeared that the file's
owner was 'root:robbins'. Now, 'robbins' is a member of
'admins', but I'm inclined to believe that that's just
coincidental. Instead, I'm willing to bet (without having
looked at it yet) that 'robbins' has the same GID on the
client as 'admins' has on the server. Could that be the
case?

Then on the Mac, everything was messed up. The Mac was
mounting /home from the NIS server via NFS, and of course
the owner of /home/[username] is 'username:username', for
all [username]s. Yet I was getting directory entries in
/home that looked like

drwxr-x---   20 mark     doug 				4096 2004-05-06 14:27 adam

Again, I think this is some odd NIS problem.

So: shouldn't NIS have corrected all these sorts of
problems? Isn't the very *point* of NIS to get around
UID/GID mismatches? I must have misconfigured something. If
someone knows NIS well, I'd love to hear what you'd do in a
case like this.

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