Comment 8 for bug 999725

These are the nsswitch results:

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$ ls -l /etc/nsswitch.conf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 600 May 1 11:28 /etc/nsswitch.conf

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$ cat /etc/nsswitch.conf
# /etc/nsswitch.conf
#
# Example configuration of GNU Name Service Switch functionality.
# If you have the `glibc-doc-reference' and `info' packages installed, try:
# `info libc "Name Service Switch"' for information about this file.

passwd: files nis compat
group: files nis compat
shadow: files nis compat

hosts: files nis dns
#hosts: files mdns4_minimal [NOTFOUND=return] dns mdns4
networks: files

protocols: db files
services: db files
ethers: db files
rpc: db files

netgroup: nis
automount: files nis

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$ cat /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.1.1 terra.sat.dundee.ac.uk terra

# The following lines are desirable for IPv6 capable hosts
::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters

I guess the 'hosts' entry was edited/replaced to add NIS, and also the netgroup and automount were added. I presume this is due to NIS not doing this sort of thing automatically when you install it (it asks for the domain, I think). I don't really understand NIS, and the guy usually responsible for this sort of thing is away, but as far as I know it only provides local-area user/machine authentication and so I would be surprised if it 'knows' about anything outside of our sub-domain (like google, or even the other university machines as they are not part of our NIS set-up).