NIS authentication from login window issues?

Question

Hi,
I've a bunch of new iMacs that arrived this week, and I'm trying to get them integrated into our existing network, using NFS mounted /home and NIS for authentication, but I'm have some issues ...
NFS mounting: no problem, this works just fine, and is mounted on boot
NIS: this is where I start having issues, ypwhich shows the correct server, ypcat passwd can get the passwd from remotely and shows everything, and I can login using ssh or even sudo to an NIS user without any issues, HOWEVER, I can't login from the login window, I just get the window doing its little shake showing an authentication failure, and nothing seems to show up in the log files to indicate what the problem may be.
Anyone got any further ideas as to what to check? I have a number of older macs that are able to do this fine, just the newly arrived ones are having these problems

Answer 1

Did you tell the system to authenticate against NIS?
Just because you're bound to a directory server, that doesn't mean you'll automatically use that server for logins.
Check Directory Access -> Authentication and make sure your NIS configuration is listed in the directories used for authentication.
The order of entries here is important, too. They're following in a top-down fashion until the first match is found. This means that if you have a user 'joe' in the local domain, an Open Directory server and in NIS and you're checking in that order, it will authenticate the user against the local account and the Open Directory account before it checks NIS, and if the username is found in one of those two options it won't query the NIS server at all.