in place upgrade from 18.04 to 18.10 breaks NIS

[Robert Dinse]

After upgrading in place servers which are NIS clients from ubuntu-mate 18.04 to ubuntu-mate 18.10, nis will not start upon boot. systemctl enable nis and systemctl start nis will not start nis. However, purging and then re-installing fixes. I.e. Save NIS conf file, cp /etc/yp.conf /etc/yp.save; apt purge nis; apt install nis; cp /etc/yp.save /etc/yp.conf; systemctl enable nis, systemctl start nis; now it works and will start properly after a reboot. This may seem trivial but it seriously broke many services for my customers until I figured it out.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.10
Package: nis 3.17.1-3 [modified: etc/yp.conf]
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.18.0-10.11-lowlatency 4.18.12
Uname: Linux 4.18.0-10-lowlatency x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu13
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: MATE
Date: Mon Oct 22 19:39:23 2018
SourcePackage: nis
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to cosmic on 2018-10-22 (0 days ago)
mtime.conffile..etc.yp.conf: 2018-10-22T10:34:30.427322

[Paul Menzel (paulmenzel)]

The change below fixed this for me. This is related to Debian bug report #906436.

[1]: https://bugs.debian.org/906436

default/nis: Remove unsupported option

Currently the service *nis* fails to start, after upgrading to Ubuntu
18.10.

> * Drop -no-dbus from YPBINDARGS= in /etc/default/nis.
> We no longer build nis with NetworkManager/D-Bus support, so setting
> this option made ypbind fail to start. (Closes: #906436)

[1]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nis/+bug/1799335/

diff --git a/default/nis b/default/nis
index 5b230a0..fdd10ee 100644
--- a/default/nis
+++ b/default/nis
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@ NISMASTER=
 YPSERVARGS=

 # Additional options to be given to ypbind when it is started.
-YPBINDARGS=-no-dbus
+YPBINDARGS=

 # Additional options to be given to yppasswdd when it is started. Note
 # that if -p is set then the YPPWDDIR above should be empty.

[Karl Stenerud (kstenerud)]

I've run some tests on this, and it appears to happen even if you don't upgrade. I've even had it happen right after install (without reboot). The most reliable fail case is rebooting.

This will need further testing to narrow down the exact cause.

[Andreas Hasenack (ahasenack)]

Thank you for taking the time to report bugs and help make Ubuntu better.

This bug has been fixed in the current Ubuntu development release, which is why I'm marking it "Fix Relased" (the bug status follows what's in the development release).

There is a correct and simple to apply workaround to /etc/default/nis and that is to remove the now invalid option "-no-dbus".

If you would like to see this fixed, please follow the SRU procedure detailed in https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Procedure. The updated package would have a fixed default config file, and *maybe* try to fix the existing config file if it encounters the bad option, perhaps using sed.