Tribblix: manual page: yppasswd.1

YPPASSWD(1) User Commands YPPASSWD(1)

NAME

yppasswd - change your network password in the NIS database

SYNOPSIS

yppasswd [username]

DESCRIPTION

The yppasswd utility changes the network password associated with
the user username in the Network Information Service (NIS) database.
If the user has done a keylogin(1), and a publickey/secretkey pair
exists for the user in the NIS publickey.byname map, yppasswd also
re-encrypts the secretkey with the new password. The NIS password may
be different from the local one on your own machine.

yppasswd prompts for the old NIS password, and then for the new one.
You must type in the old password correctly for the change to take
effect. The new password must be typed twice, to forestall mistakes.

New passwords must be at least four characters long, if they use a
sufficiently rich alphabet, and at least six characters long if
monocase. These rules are relaxed if you are insistent enough. Only
the owner of the name or the super-user may change a password;
superuser on the root master will not be prompted for the old
password, and does not need to follow password construction
requirements.

The NIS password daemon, rpc.yppasswdd must be running on your NIS
server in order for the new password to take effect.

WARNINGS

Even after the user has successfully changed his or her password
using this command, the subsequent login(1) using the new password
will be successful only if the user's password and shadow information
is obtained from NIS. See getpwnam(3C), getspnam(3C), and
nsswitch.conf(5).

NOTES

The use of yppasswd is discouraged, as it is now only a wrapper
around the passwd(1) command, which should be used instead. Using
passwd(1) with the -r nis option will achieve the same results, and
will be consistent across all the different name services available.

BUGS