Centos – NIS failing to bind

centosnetworkmanagernisrpcyp

I have a bunch of machines which authenticate via NIS to a central server. I just bought a new CentOS 6.2 client machine, and it can't authenticate.

The following is a list of the classics people get wrong/forget when dealing with NIS:

1) The client machine can ping the server (and ssh in)

Tested using

    ping swordfish 

    ping <ip address>

Both of which generate an appropriate response

2) A ypbind process is running on the client

Tested by doing

ps -e | grep ypbind
3172 ?        00:00:00 ypbind

3) /etc/yp.conf is formatted correctly and contains the correct details

4)The firewall is off
So that's hopefully not the problem

5) The service starter thinks everything is OK

    /sbin/service ypbind restart

    Shutting down NIS service:                                 [  OK  ]
    Starting NIS service:                                      [  OK  ]
    Binding NIS service:
    .....                                                      [  OK  ]

The Problem

  • There's no RPC binding as far as I can tell

    /usr/sbin/rpcinfo -p # no ypbind programs
    
  • There are no binding files in /var/yp/binding/
  • If I view the message log in /var/logs/messages then the following type of report is generated every time I restart the ypbind service

    Sep  7 14:21:34 localhost ypbind: NIS domain: whaleshark, NIS server:
    

Where whaleshark is the name of the NIS domain, but apparently it has no info on the NIS server? Running ypwhich yields;

ypwhich: Can't communicate with ypbind

Any thoughts or steps I could take would be greatly appreciated!

Best Answer

Ha - I've been trying to figure this out for hours, but just realized the NetworkManager daemon is running, which apparently is blocking when the network interfaces are set to not use the NetworkManager.

Simply running

service NetworkManager stop

And then restarting fixed everything. Hopefully this will help other people out - I saw a bunch of similar looking symptoms online but no-one mentioned the NetworkManager at all.