>> But...what breaks?
> Password changing broke for me.

Well, I tried that.  I created t^Bu (I use ^-plus-letter combinations
throughout for control characters here).  I set its password to gren^N.
I then logged in as it, over a "telnet 127.0.0.1" and changed its
password, using /usr/bin/passwd, from gren^N to blu^E.  I then checked
that the hash in master.passwd was correct for blu^E, and it was.
(Would-be nasties: don't bother poking around to see which machine this
was on; I removed it from master.passwd before I even started writing
this letter.)

Now, there was no NIS getting underfoot here.  Since I no longer have
official admin access to any NIS machines, I can't test that (short of
trying to figure it out on NetBSD, which would prove little since the
point of using NIS is interoperability).

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