nsswitch.conf group info from NIS

[xyzzy13]

Anyone else having problems with setting nsswitch.conf to use nis to get group tables?

I just installed Mint LMDE 2 Betsy amd64 in a virtualbox VM to test things out. It's a completely clean install with exactly the following additional packages installed:

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% sudo apt-get nis autofs nfs-common

Everything boots fine at this point, but if I change one line in /etc/nsswitch.conf from:

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group:    compat

to

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group:  files nis

The system freezes on boot and never comes up. Funny thing is that if I do the same so the passwd tables are pulled from NIS, there's no problem -- it's only the group table.

This has been going on for a while in both ubuntu and mint (and a quick test with debian 10.1.0 seems to show the same behavior). In the past I've messed around with the startup scripts to make this work, but it requires some serious messing around that typically changes with each new release and I'd like to finally sort it out.

Anyone have any ideas? There are entries related to this in the ubuntu forums as well going back years, but no clear solutions. Is NIS just not being used mainstream any longer?

Thanks
jamie