I was trying to set up two slave servers on new 11.4 machines to back up my existing NIS master server which is on an old (11.0) host. These two machines were already set up as NIS clients, and were working OK. So I installed the NIS server package and tried to configure them as slave servers using YaST2. At the final stage I got an error popup with the message “Could not get list with slaves”. I tracked this down to the return from yphelper, which is called from the YaST2 configuration scripts.
# /usr/lib/yp/yphelper --maps <servername> --domainname <ypdomain>
was producing no output. After some investigation, it turns out that you have to use the “right” name for the NIS master server - not the IP address or an alias - otherwise ypmaster doesn’t get the list of maps. So when using YaST2 to configure a NIS slave server, the name entered as the “master server” name has to be the right one. If you get this problem, try using each different name by which the server might be known in the yphelper line above, until you find the one that gives the right output, such as:
# /usr/lib/yp/yphelper --maps masterip --domainname mydomain
(no output)
# /usr/lib/yp/yphelper --maps mastername --domainname mydomain
(no output)
# /usr/lib/yp/yphelper --maps mastername.mydomain --domainname mydomain
hosts.byname
auto.master
ypservers
hosts.byaddr
group.byname
passwd.byuid
passwd.byname
group.bygid
AFAICT, the “right” answer is the first name as written in the hosts file on the NIS master, even though you may have a different one first in your local /etc/hosts!
Does anyone know why yphelper is so fussy?