I have a number of SUNs that are using NIS for authentication and NIS for home directory and file access. I also have printers that are configured in a W2K server. I added the printers to the Solaris machines using admintool, and have had success when trying to print as root (a local user). However, when trying to print as an NIS user from an NFS mounted directory I get the following error: NFS access failed for server [servername]: error 7 (RPC: Authentication error) [filename]: I/O error The NFS error line actually repeats a number of times. When I try to print as an NIS user from a local directory, I receive the same NFS error message, but instead of the I/O error line there is a message indicating the request ID and which printer the job was sent to -- and the print job goes through properly. This is all printing from the command line (using lp); printing through applications such as Netscape works fine. I'm not sure how to resolve this issue. Any help would be much appreciated. Andrew

Hum... what does your printers line look like in /etc/nsswitch.conf ? It's a long shot, and it's probably set up right as it is as you're getting the RPC error...

printers: user files nis Does this seem right to you? Would you change anything? Thanks, Andrew

After playing with it for a bit, I determined that it has something to do with permissions and who the lp process runs as. When I enable anonymous access to the NFS exported filesystem, NIS users can print no problem. I do not, however, want to leave this anonymous access open. I noticed that lp runs as root, so I thought if I removed its setuid bit, lp would run as the user and have access to the necessary directories (root does not have access to NFS mounted directories because it is a local account). This generated the following error: "Error creating job: check spooling directory: /var/spool/print" So, I made /var/spool/print rwx for everyone and got this error: "couldn't validate local spool area(/var/spool/print)" Is there a way to get this to work, or is there some restriction on the permissions of the spooling directory? I think the original problem stems from the fact that my root accounts are local machine accounts, not an NIS account. Does anyone know of a way to work this out? (I can't have the root accounts be NIS, and I don't want to make anonymous NFS access an option.) Thanks, Andrew