urgent nis+ help requested as deadline is near

[Ravi Kiran]

Hello everybody,
                We have dualboot XP, RH7.3 linux(running KDE) systems. WE
already have solaris 8.0 NIS+ server serving the solaris NIS+ clients. I
have previously made a prototype of a dualboot XP, RH7.3 client work with
NIS+ on the existing solaris 8.0 server(note that only RH7.3 clinets are
required to authenticate via NIS+). The prototype had GNOME instead of KDE
I was successful then. NOw with the KDE on Iam having problems.
   As my deadline is within 2 weeks to deploy 30 dualboot systems(see
above) on NIS+ Iam kinda worried here. I would appreaciate any help from
you guys. I used nis-utils-1.4.1 from
http://www.linux-nis.org/nisplus/nis-utils/
and used the configuration steps given in
http://www.math.ucalgary.ca/~mlwruble/help/nisplusconfig.txt

Just to give you the complete scenario I have these important rpm's
necessary for NIS+ already installed on the previous gnome system that was
successful.-
binutils-2.11.93
cpp-2.96-110
gcc-2.96.110
glibc-devel-2.2.5-34
glibc-kernheaders-2.4-7.14
gmp-devel-4.0

NOw I have made sure all these are there when I installed linux(RH7.3 FROM
CD) on the new machines. NOw after following the steps mentioned in the
above link, if I say nisinit -c -H <nis+servername> it gives me the
following error

Using x.x.x.x as NIS+ server ...
Couldn't connect to rpc.nisd on host.lab.mydomain.edu (x.x.x.x)

when I type nisdefaults I get teh following(host is host name)

Principal Name : host.lab.mydomain.edu. (not authenticated)
Domain Name    : lab.mydomain.edu.
Host Name      : host.lab.mydomain.edu.
Group Name     :
Access Rights  : ----rmcdr---r---
Time to live   : 12:00:00
Search Path    : lab.mydomain.edu.
               : mydomain.edu.

WHEN I TYPE NISDOMAINNAME IT SUCCESSFULLY SHOWS MY NIS+ DOMAINNAME. 
WHEN I TYPE niscat passwd.org_dir IT GIVES ME THE FOLLOWING

[root at host root]# niscat passwd.org_dir
passwd.org_dir: NIS+ service is unavailable or not installed

Is this a client installation problem or server problem??
Even if anybody can tell me how to use GHOST to copy whole linux partition
that would be of great help as My prototype with GNOME is still good. I
can just copy it to all the systems and avoid this pain of debugging.

Can anybody please help me out with this problem. how come it worked
previously without any error. It was pretty smooth install nis-utils, add
credentials..boom it worked. NOw its giving me a lot of problems. Being a
new comer I dont know what to look at. Any help would be greatly
appreciated.

Ravi Kiran


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