NAME
yppasswd — change login password in Network Information System (NIS)
SYNOPSIS
yppasswd
[name]
Remarks
The Network Information Service (NIS) was formerly known as Yellow Pages (YP).
The functionality remains the same; only the name has changed.
DESCRIPTION
yppasswd
changes or installs a password associated with the login
name
in the Network Information System (NIS).
The NIS password can be different from the one on your own machine.
If
name
is omitted, it defaults to the name returned by
getlogin()
(see
getlogin(3C)).
yppasswd
prompts for the old NIS password (even if it does not exist),
then twice for the new one.
The old password must be entered correctly for the change to take effect.
Checks occur to ensure that the new password meets
the following construction requirements.
Only the first eight characters are significant.
A password can be as few as four characters long if it contains
at least one special character or
a mixture of numeric, uppercase and lowercase letters.
A password can be as few as five characters long if it contains a mixture of
uppercase and lowercase letters or
numeric and either uppercase or lowercase letters.
A password must contain at least six characters if it
contains only monocase letters.
All these rules except the first are relaxed if you try three times
to enter an unacceptable new password.
You cannot, however, enter a null password.
Only the owner of the
name
or the superuser can change a password.
The Network Information System password daemon,
yppasswdd(1M),
must be running on the master NIS password server to change NIS passwords.
WARNINGS
The password update protocol
passes the old and new passwords to the master NIS server at once.
Thus, if the old NIS password is incorrect,
no notification is given until the new NIS password is successfully entered.
The
yppasswd
password construction rules are different from those of the HP-UX
passwd
command (see
passwd(1)).
User applications that call this routine must be linked with
/usr/include/librpcsvc.a.
For example,
AUTHOR
yppasswd
was developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
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