Problem updating NIS passwords via rpc.yppasswdd

[Kirk Strauser <kirk@strauser.com>]

I am running OpenBSD 3.0 on a SPARCstation5.  It is acting as the master NIS
server for my network, and correctly pushes updates to a seperate slave
server.  Everything seems to be working beautifully, except that I can't
seem to update any user passwords with the passwd program.

I build my NIS maps off of a subset of passwd, master.passwd, et al stored
in /var/yp/honeypot_src.  To create a user, I've been using the adduser
command, then snipping the appropriate lines from
/etc/{passwd,master.passwd,group} and pasting them into my local versions
(on a side note, any other ideas would be most welcome!).  Both ypserv and
ypbind are running on the server, which has:

   +kirk:::::::::/usr/local/bin/bash

as the last line in the /etc password files.

When I try to update a user's password, I get:

  root@owl:/var/yp/honeypot_src# passwd jennifer
  passwd: to change another user's Kerberos password, do
          "passwd -k -u <user>";
  to change a user's local passwd, use "passwd -l <user>"

Since passwd doesn't grok that I'm wanting to change the NIS password, I use
the `-y' flag:

  root@owl:/var/yp/honeypot_src# passwd -y jennifer
  Changing YP password for jennifer.
  Old password: <something>
  New password: <new pw>
  Retype new password: <new pw>
  Couldn't change YP password.

First, I *have* verified that rpc.yppasswdd is running.

For testing purposes, I've tried running rpc.yppasswdd with and without a
`-d /var/yp/honeypot_src' flag.  I've tried the process with and without
ypbind running, in case that was causing some interference.  There is no
firewalling on the server, and portmap is definitely running.

I really don't know where to look to investigate further.  Is there some
obvious debugging flag that I could be using that's not active by default?
I don't get any log messages or any sort of meaningful error output, so I'm
kind of stumped.
-- 
Kirk Strauser