I'm gathering that many people aren't using NIS for authentication with their OS X servers. I've tried contacting several folks at Apple as well as posting on several lists with no help so far.
We have a cluster of 32 Xserves and 10 Linux boxes. We have an NIS server running on a Linux box. The Xserves get their authentication from there using the Directory Services plug-in. They get their information just fine. The problem is they never update it! If you change a password on the NIS master if never gets propagated to the Xserves unless you reboot them. The Linux boxes update their password caches immediately.
We've tried changing the lookup order in NetInfo, running "lookupd -flushcache" and nothing seems to work. Finding a solution for this problem could actually help with a larger possible issue later on.
I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts or suggestions. And yes, I've googled every possible combination of NIS, Apple, Panther and OS X. And yes, I've seen the Bresnik site. :-)
Thanks!