SUMMARY: 'niscat auto_direct' shows nothing and automount doesn't work

Many thanks to Paul Hybert. His reply hits the jackpot!
Indeed for those problem users, they didn't get authenticated.

However, I found another strange thing: nisdefaults showed that
some users have been authenticated on one system, but not on
another system, although both systems are authenticated
and all user accounts are managed by NIS+. The user can choose
any system to login. Their home directory will be automounted to
whatever system they logged in.

Any suggestions, please.

Here is Paul's reply. My original message is at the bottom.

---------------------------------------------------------
The problem is with either NIS+ credentials for users, or
permissions on the NIS+ table.
niscat -o NIS+_table.name     shows the permissions on that table

nisdefaults                   shows information about the user 
running that command

Use those two commands to see details (especially on nisdefaults,
look for something about "user is not authenticated" or something
close to that.

Your message was not clear: you mention user-defined NIS+ table
named auto_direct, but the error message you showed was for 
auto_mailhost.

Maybe the error is not with THAT particular table itself, but
with the table that references it.

Paul Hybert
prh@ece.iit.edu

--------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> Hi there,
> 
> I think I might have problems of NIS+ permission problem, but
> I am not sure. Here is my story:
> 
> System: 5.8 Generic_108528-14 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
> 
> This is a NIS+ client. The root user can use nisls to list
> all NIS+ tables. It can use niscat to display the contents of
> system tables , e.g. auto_master, auto_home, passwd, etc. 
However
> using niscat to display the contents of the user defined 
> auto_direct tables always give nothing. All regular users
> have the same problem as the root user, except one account.
> This luck user can display the contents of all the tables.
> 
> I have tried to setup the exact .profile  and .kshrc files
> as the 'luck user' for other users in hope that the others 
> will be able to display the user-defined auto_direct table. 
> I have no luck.
> 
> Because the root account can't display the contents of the
> auto_direct table, when I run automount as root, I got the 
> following error message:
> 
> May 29 10:05:36 myhost automount[15257]: [ID 527529 
> daemon.warning] nis_list: NIS+ error Not found encountered on 
> name auto_mailhost.org_dir.mydomain.name.ca. in table 
> auto_mailhost.org_dir.mydomain.name.ca.'s path.
> 
> I have another ultra10 system with the same OS and patch level
> having the similar problem. On this system the root and some
> users have no problems using niscat for all NIS+ tables. 
However,
> some other users can't display the user defined table
> auto_direct. Again I tried to setup all users in the same way: 
> the same ksh, same .profile, and using the same global
> /etc/profile. I don't have any luck at all.
> 
> Does any one know what's going on here? I will summarize
> the response.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Yuan Lu
> _______________________________________________
> sunmanagers mailing list
> sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
> http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers
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