Server for NIS service crashing at the startup

We recently got an issue where the Server for NIS service was crashing at a startup. In the environment, customer had added W2K8 R2 based DC and installed IDMU in his existing W2K3R2 based IDMU setup.

To begin with we tried checking if the numbers of available port are getting exhausted but that was not the issue. Then, took LDIF exports of NIS map for users and group and looked into it. Nothing seems to be wrong from the LDIF exports.

So to further troubleshoot on this, we collected the dumps while the Service was crashing. From the dumps it seemed that the issue was caused because of heap corruption. The dumps were also pointing to one of the user account which may be causing it.

So, we removed the Unix related attributed for this one user and Server for NIS service seems to be working fine. After collecting the LDIF output for this user again we noticed that the unixUserPassword holds two different values for this user.

To summarize the root casue: “A user in the AD was somehow populated with two different values for the unixUserPassword attribute which was causing heap corruption in the NIS service.”

To resolve the issue” We removed the unwanted (default) value from the attribute and started Server for NIS.