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I've setup NIS on Centos 5.3 following the fairly sketchy documentation online, it seems to be working pretty well, however whenever I run ypcat passwd, either from the server or the client, no entries are ever returned.

There's definitely some entries in the /etc/passwd file on the server and I've run ypinit, as well as tried running make in /var/yp to rebuild the database.

ypcat hosts works fine, I get the hosts file from the server, I don't get any errors in the log. Both machines are setup to in nsswitch.conf to read from NIS as well as files.

Any ideas why this wouldn't be working?

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You might consider using likewise open for authentication. I have NIS in my production environment and personally I find it to be hell, but I am sure others use it successfully. You can find people's opinions on the topic in other serverfault questions. – Kyle Brandt♦ Jun 15 '09 at 22:21
I'd add another vote for not using NIS. NIS is falling out of favour. Unless you have legacy servers, you'd be better off using LDAP. There's a lot more documentation and more people are using it and have experience of it. – David Pashley Jun 15 '09 at 23:22
I'm not planning on using it in production, just in a smallish test environment. – JamesHannah Jun 16 '09 at 8:32
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OK, so this is a bit of a facepalm moment, NIS doesn't show any users with UIDs <500 in it's passwd export, I hadn't added any non-privileged users to the VM I was testing it on. all works fine now :-S

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Have you configured /etc/nsswitch.conf? It should contain lines such as:

passwd:     files nis
group:      files nis
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Yeah - it's exactly as you've written it there. – JamesHannah Jun 15 '09 at 21:47
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Have you tried:

ypcat passwd.byname

or

ypcat passwd.byuid

Also, on your NIS server are there db files for the passwd map?

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Both return nothing, there are passwd.byname and passwd.byuid files in /var/yp/internal, also more annoyingly, when I make a change to the passwd file and then run make in the /var/yp directory, the passwd files do get updated, however there's still nothing returned from ypcat. Might also add I tried adding "+::::::" to the end of the passwd file with no effect. – JamesHannah Jun 15 '09 at 21:58
Are you sure it is grabbing your /etc/passwd for building the map? Have you queried the actual db files created in /var/yp/internal/passwd.byname? – TCampbell Jun 15 '09 at 22:39
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