Well, I decided to fire up my little IIci again and fiddle with it some 
more.  Got autobooting working, rlogin going, NFS mounts mounted, and 
decided it was time to join the NIS domain I use at home.

Set the domainname and frobbed /etc/nsswitch.conf as normal then ran 
``ypbind -broadcast''
At this point, it hung like as though it couldn't contact a server.
So, after digging through the manpage some more, I created 
/var/yp/binding/<mydomain>.ypservers with a singe line containing the 
name of my NIS server.
Stopped using -broadcast.  Still hung.
Went back to nsswitch.conf and discovered to my chagrin that I put nis 
first *blush* fixed that and changed the .ypservers file to contain the 
IP instead of the host.
Still hung.

Well, maybe it can't connect to that server then... so I tried to ping 
it.  No go.  No packets sent no matter how long you wait... which struck 
me as odd, so I tried pinging localhost with the same results.

So, do I have one or two problems here?