Solaris 9 NIS user creation issue

Helloo to all...

what is the correct way to assign a password to a new NIS user on a NIS master server?

When I the following:
useradd -s /bin/bash -d /export/home/username -m username

The user get created fine but when I try to assign a password I get:

#passwd username
Changing nis password for username on (servername)
Current password:

I dont understand why i get this when the user was just created. Thanks in advance to all who reply......