hi,

i setup a simple nis master-slave-client in vmware. all of which are under a single subnet.

when the master is up, all other hosts can authenticate properly. however, when the master is down (i already got the slave running), other hosts cannot login through the slave even though ypwhich outputs the name of the slave. what i am wondering is that the clients are already 'bound' to the slave, but they seem to authenticate.

all i get is the window which says that "Unable to access home directory. Click OK to start failsafe session, or Cancel to restart login." if i try to click on the ok, i would find myself in the / directory with the failsafe session.

what seems to be problem with this scenario?

What do you mean by "host cannot login" ? I suppose it is "users cannot login on that host".
Actually, from what you describe, users *can* login, but their home directory isn't reachable (mounted), so it's more an NFS problem, assuming home dirs are NFS shared between all hosts.
Is the NFS server the same as your master NIS server ?

actually yes, the nis master server is also the nfs server.

Well, so it's obvious your users won't be able to see their home directories while the server is down ...