I have a NIS client running Red Hat Advanced Server 3. The system is not allowing NIS accounts to login through ssh or gdm. Telnet works. The NIS master is a Red Hat 7.3 system. NIS is not configured to join the password and shadow file together. Has anyone configured a Red Hat Advanced Server NIS client yet? Is anyone seeing the same problem?

/etc/nsswitch.conf from NIS client:
passwd: compat
shadow: files nis
group: compat

last line in /etc/password on NIS client:
+::4294967295:4294967295:::

error message when trying to login with ssh from /var/log/secure:
Dec 1 10:35:45 sal sshd[30857]: Illegal user testuser from 192.168.2.5
Dec 1 10:35:48 sal sshd[30857]: Failed none for illegal user testuser from 192.168.2.5 port 1554
Dec 1 10:35:52 sal sshd[30857]: Failed password for illegal user testuser from 192.168.2.5 port 1554

error message when tyring to login with ssh from /var/log/messages:
Dec 1 10:35:45 sal sshd(pam_unix)[30857]: check pass; user unknown
Dec 1 10:35:45 sal sshd(pam_unix)[30857]: authentication failure; logname= uid=0 euid=0 tty=NODEVssh ruser= rhost=192.168.2.5

message from /var/log/secure with using telnet:
Dec 1 10:39:24 sal xinetd[585]: START: telnet pid=30861 from=192.168.2.5

message from /var/log/messages with using telnet:
Dec 1 10:39:28 sal login(pam_unix)[30862]: session opened for user testuser by (uid=0)
Dec 1 10:39:28 sal -- testuser[30862]: LOGIN ON pts/3 BY testuser FROM 192.168.2.5

I finally fixed the problem. I was not aware that services had to be restarted after NIS had been configured to allow NIS authentication. After restarting sshd and gdm, all the NIS accounts started working.

I was fighting the same problem today. I had made the same
/etc/nsswitch and /etc/passwd changes you note.

I came across the man page for the curses tool authconfig, which
led me to the file /etc/sysconfig/authconfig.

I changed the USENIS directive to yes and restarted the services
(or you can just reboot).

Thought I would post this here for posterity, since I found a
number of posts on the problem when searching google, but no
answers except yours on linuxquestions.org.

Thought I'd throw in... I had the same error, turned out that I had my NIS slave server listed before my NIS master on the client. details details.