NIS and /etc/group

["Stephen A. Witt" <sawitt@electra.fu.hac.com>]

I've just set up NIS on a small group of Debian machines with one NIS
server and the rest as clients. Everything seems to be working fine, with
one small exception. Most of the users need to be able to use minicom or
kermit to connect as a dumb terminal to some devices in our lab and so
I've added them to the 'dialout' group in /etc/group on the NIS server.
These changes aren't being propagated by the NIS server to the clients
however. I've tried a couple of different things in the /etc/group files
on the clients to fix this but haven't been successful yet. This is all on
slink by the way.

The first configuration was with a group file on the client exactly as it
comes out of the box from a Debian install, with the addition of the
'*:::' as specified in 'nis.debian.howto.gz'. The only groups I see on any
of the clients are :

% ypcat group
users:*:100:
nogroup:*:65534:

I then tried 'group' with just '+:::' in it, nothing else, hoping that it
would pick up all the groups (including the default groups) from the
server, but it didn't change. I got the identical results as above.

So, do I have to edit all of the group files on the clients and add the
users to the dialout group? I hoped that NIS would take care of this for
me.

Thanks...