Ok, here’s a quick one.

I recently had the Ubuntu upgrade popup kick in on my desktop computer, prompting me to upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04. It was a rainy afternoon, so I went ahead.

Things seemed to go fine (even my dual screen Nvidia setup worked), but I could no longer log in from either the desktop or ssh. The local root account was fine, but none of the network users could log in.

So, this was an NIS / ypbind problem.

I logged in as root and ran ypwhich, which reported it could not connect to ypbind. However, networking was working, and I could ping the NIS server.

Running /etc/init.d/nis restart didn’t do anything, but when I ran ypbind manually, all of a sudden I was able to log in.

Ubuntu likes to change their startup scripts as often as politicians like to change their faces, so I wasn’t overly surprised. Most likely the startup order had changed, and maybe NIS was being brought up before networking was initialised.

My quick and dirty solution

Ok, so I’m getting old, and I don’t enjoy this as much as I once did. I’d rather not spend the entire day deep in the bowls of upstart or systemd or whatever the new thing Ubuntu is using today.

So, this isn’t the correct solution, but it works.

  1. Log in as root
  2. Edit the crontab: crontab -e
  3. Add this line: @reboot /usr/sbin/ypbind &

Save and reboot, and you should be able to log in.

Yes, I know this is dirty, but honestly life is too short!

8 thoughts on “FIXED: NIS not working after upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04

  1. Had the same issue. After some debugging I found that YPBINDARGS=-no-dbus in /etc/default/nis caused that. It seems this option is no longer available and ypbind silently fails at startup instead of just ignoring it.

  2. Hi, I have a computer room at school with NIS and NFS, a server with user folders and authentication and some client workstations. Server has Ubuntu 18.04, clients upgraded to Ubuntu 20.04. After that upgrade several details (audio and usb keys are the most annoying) don’t work anymore for users on clients. That is, some local hardware is not available if user is authenticated with NIS (but they work with guest account) Did anybody of you have the same issues?

  3. No, I didn’t experience that, but almost certainly it means that some group membership that is required has either changed or no longer exposed.

  4. Thank you for notifying me that commenting out YPBINDARGS=-no-dbus in /etc/default/nis resolved the problem of ypbind failing on Ubuntu 20.04 lts.

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