yppasswd - change your network password in the NIS database
The yppasswd utility changes the network password associated with the
user username in the Network Information Service (NIS) database.
If the user has done a keylogin(1), and a publickey/secretkey pair
exists for the user in the NIS publickey.byname map,
yppasswd also re-encrypts the secretkey with the new password. The
NIS password may be different from the local one on your own machine.
yppasswd prompts for the old NIS password, and then
for the new one. You must type in the old password correctly for the change
to take effect. The new password must be typed twice, to forestall
mistakes.
New passwords must be at least four characters long, if they use a
sufficiently rich alphabet, and at least six characters long if monocase.
These rules are relaxed if you are insistent enough. Only the owner of the
name or the super-user may change a password; superuser on the root master
will not be prompted for the old password, and does not need to follow
password construction requirements.
The NIS password daemon, rpc.yppasswdd must be
running on your NIS server in order for the new password to take
effect.
Even after the user has successfully changed his or her password using this
command, the subsequent login(1) using the new password will be
successful only if the user's password and shadow information is obtained from
NIS. See getpwnam(3C), getspnam(3C), and
nsswitch.conf(5).
The use of yppasswd is discouraged, as it is now only a wrapper around
the passwd(1) command, which should be used instead. Using
passwd(1) with the -r nis option will achieve the same
results, and will be consistent across all the different name services
available.
The update protocol passes all the information to the server in one RPC
call, without ever looking at it. Thus, if you type your old password
incorrectly, you will not be notified until after you have entered your new
password.