[Bug 1181275] Re: RPC failure on NIS operation

[Michael Meier]

Please fix this very annoying and completely needless regression before the next LTS release.
Yes, the initial NIS spec said the limit was 1024 bytes. But all Linux clients have had the limit set at 64 KB instead since forever. The server still does. It does not make sense to suddenly break clients for no reason at all, especially considering this is an old protocol mostly used in legacy deployments.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1181275

Title:
  RPC failure on NIS operation

Status in “eglibc” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Starting with 13.04, NIS fails when parsing long group lines (in my
  case, 1262 bytes).

  On login, errors such as the following are repeated numerous times:

  yp_all: clnt_call: RPC: Can't decode result
  do_ypcall: clnt_call: RPC: Can't decode result

  The root cause can be seen with ypcat, where the first long group line
  causes a failure:

  $ ypcat group.byname
  <shorter lines printed correctly>
  yp_all: clnt_call: RPC: Can't decode result
  No such map group.byname. Reason: RPC failure on NIS operation

  Perhaps this is due to a security fix similar to this one in RHEL,
  where YP record parsing was limited to YPMAXRECORD (1024):

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=848748

  The regression this caused was reported and fixed for Fedora 18:

  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=892777
  https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/glibc-2.16-31.fc18
  http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/scm-commits/Week-of-Mon-20130429/1008442.html

  As mentioned in that bug report, NIS entries are technically limited
  to 1024 characters, but Linux has not historically enforced this. A
  workaround is to break long group entries into separate lines with
  slightly different names but the same GID:

  http://www.linux-nis.org/nis-howto/HOWTO/maps.html#AEN548

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