Hi everyone! I have a problem with NIS and I'm hoping one of you experts can point me in the right direction

I have setup 2 Solaris10 machines in VMWare and I was following this guide I found:

Solaris: NIS installation and configuration - Basically Tech

After following that guide, I was able to create 1 NIS master server and my NIS client.

ypwhich points to the correct master server but when I do a ypcat hosts I get "RPC failure on yp operation"

now from what I read, this is related to not having ypbind running but I had performed ypbind -broadcast to get properly bounded on the client in order to get ypwhich correctly working.

when I perform ypmatch username passwd I get the correct information though and I've added more users on my master server and the information is correct when I perform ypmatch username passwd on my client.

This is where my problem lies... I was under the impression that ypmatch and ypcat both grab from the same map files from /var/yp/domainname

Any experts out there know what my problem might be?
Any specific config files you need me to post, I will gladly post them...

both my client and server are identical in respects to

hosts
defaultrouter
defaultdomain
nsswitch.conf
the Makefile is default on my master server

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated as I've talked to some friends and they don't really know what the problem is.

Thanks,
Erin

Any experts out there that might know the answer?

Ok, you need to be more specific to what your problem is, whats the issue here ? The fact ypbind did not run automatically ? Or the fact when you added more users to the master they did not show up in the yomatch ? Its not clear but you do mention all is well on the client once bound when you added the new users ... You are correct in thinking the maps are grabbed from the domain directory ...

If the new users do not show up on the client you added you probably did not cd /var/yp and then run make (you may have to run rm passwd.time) to push the new data to the yp db's

EDIT :-

If it is the fact ypbind does not run automatically you should run

svcadm enable nis/client

to allow smf to start this service

Thanks for the reply, I'll try to clarify.

ypbind is running on my client (I had performed svcadm nis/client and it is enabled when I double-checked with svcs -a |grep nis)

on my server, I have both nis/client and nis/server running
I have also pushed the data (cd /var/yp ; make)

now on my server, (host1) ypcat passwd gives me the correct changes,etc and ypwhich points to the correct master server (host1)

but on my client, ypcat passwd gives me "RPC failure on yp operation"
when I do ypwhich, it gives me the correct master server (host1)

But what's wierd is when I perform ypmatch username passwd, I get the correct information...

I want to be able to use ypcat on my client which currently is not working

any solutions or advice?

EDIT: (added some more info)

This is just an observation, but this might give insight to my problem?

when I perform ypcat hosts on my master-server

my output is
ip host1
ip client
ip host1

I have 2 entries of host1, I've re-configured the master server (ypinit -m) countless times but I keep getting 2 entries for host1

if I cat /etc/hosts I only have:

ip host1
ip client

keep in mind my Makefile has DIR = /etc (default)