Thus spake Greg A. Woods ("GAW> ") sometime Today...

GAW> > Also I'm not sure NIS can use something else than the kernel's domainname.
GAW>
GAW> In my experience 99.99% of sites don't use NIS domain names, even those
GAW> using NIS for the username database.

You must have been to a great many sites (like around 1,000,000 of them)
to be able to make a claim like this.

NIS kind of needs a domainname in order to run properly (hint: ypbind
doesn't take a "-d domain" argument, last I looked, although "ypserv"
does...).  Even if NIS used ypbind -broadcast, if there's nothing answering
the domain as set by "domainname", ypbind will just sit there unbound until
something does answer.

And, last I looked, ypbind would bomb out if [ "`domainname`" = "" ].

So, if they're running NIS for anything at all, yes, they do have to
have domainname set.

				--*greywolf;
--
NetBSD: Two guys with a vax.