Services must restart after changing NIS domain
 

I have changed the name of my NIS domain for various good reasons.

The first problem was that the clients persisted in looking for the old domain, while the yp.conf clearly stated:
domain nis.rnb server 192.168.0.20

First this to do was to set the domainname to the new domain:
domainname nis.rnb

But (at least in Debian) the clients still persisted to keep looking for the old name, which was not available on the server as mentioned.
Changing /etc/defaultdomainname solved that eventually.

Secondly, I noticed that cron jobs which used a NIS-authenticated user for running jobs (from /etc/crontab) would not run as authentication errors occured. This was solved by restarting cron.

Worse was that even the mail server Dovecot had to be restarted in order to be able to authenticate users again.

Just be warned that changing a NIS domain is not straightforward and can have undesired side effects.

jlinkels