Celeb Glow
general | March 26, 2026

Problem with NIS configuration

I tried to configure NIS in a server and a client both running Ubuntu 14.04 following this guide and this official guide.

After a reboot the client machine got locked with this message several times repeated:

YPBINDPROC_DOMAIN: Domain not bound

any button couldn't be useful to exit and launch the GUI with a regular login.

I can normally use the machine only with the network disconnected (otherwise, it takes a long time even to open a terminal and sometimes the terminal window crashes).

It displays again tens of times the message YPBINDPROC_DOMAIN: Domain not bound.

The client machine is regularly indicated in the /etc/hosts.allow file of the server.

During the configuration, rpcbind was automatically installed instead of portmap and I couldn't run the command sudo update-rc.d portmap defaults 10 at the beginning of the guide. Moreover, the command

sudo /etc/init.d/rpcbind restart

worked; but

sudo /etc/init.d/nis restart

didn't work because there was no /etc/init.d/nis file neither in the client nor in the server. I installed NIS with sudo apt-get install nis! Does Ubuntu 14.04 work different with respect to the previous versions?

And is it possible to recover from this situation?

(I moved here the question from unix.stackexchange.com)

2 Answers

From

Not your fault, it's a bug in the documentation:

The package uses upstart, which uses files in /etc/init/ rather than /etc/init.d/.

But I also don't know how to restart nis now...

Also, it seems like no one wants nis anymore

The package name is nis, but the server's service name is ypserv and the client's service name is ypbind.

On the client side:

start ypbind

On the server side:

start ypserv

In the future use dpkg -L to find out which start scripts come with a package. Upstart scripts can be find under /etc/inet. Something like this should get you the info you want:

dpkg -L nis | grep inet

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Sign up using Google Sign up using Facebook Sign up using Email and Password

Post as a guest

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy