Why Would Ls, While Or Ci Use NIS?

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CentOS 3 Comments

I have an entry in root’s crontab:

#ls -1 /etc/RCS|sed “s~\(.*\),v~\1~”|while read file; do ls -la
/etc/$file|ci -q -l /etc/$file ;done

Error output I received:
do_ypcall: clnt_call: RPC: Unable to receive; errno = No route to host YPBINDPROC_DOMAIN: Domain not bound do_ypcall: clnt_call: RPC: Unable to receive; errno = No route to host YPBINDPROC_DOMAIN: Domain not bound do_ypcall: clnt_call: RPC: Unable to receive; errno = No route to host YPBINDPROC_DOMAIN: Domain not bound do_ypcall: clnt_call: RPC: Unable to receive; errno = No route to host YPBINDPROC_DOMAIN: Domain not bound

This looks like NIS (DNS?) error output, but what could be invoking anything that uses NIS or DNS in that command? ls, ci, and while don’t need it unless they are applied to some NFS mounted file, but this is executed as root with a *local* home directory on *local* files, no need for YP. The only hypotheses I can think of are “my copies of bash or ci have been compromised” or “I am stupid”.

Enlighten me, please. Dave

3 thoughts on - Why Would Ls, While Or Ci Use NIS?

  • Do you have any ‘nis’ entries in /etc/nsswitch.conf for passwd or group? It might be using NIS to try to look up user/group information on files that have uid/gid numbers that aren’t in the local passwd/group files.

  • If you have NIS configured, it’ll be used by anything that needs to map a uid or gid number to a name, or anything that needs a list of groups for users, among other things.

    That means (IIRC) that having a crontab implies a NIS lookup, because creating a new session for your user needs to fetch supplementary groups from NIS (even for root).

    ‘ls -l’ might also do lookups to resolve the uid/gid of your local files. “local files” does not imply that there is no need for YP.