Hello everybody again and thanks to for the various answers!

We got ypbind/NIS working on SL7, and it should be out of the box (if leaving 
OOTB setup completely untouched). There is a subtle interplay of 
NetworkManager, dbus and rpcbind, which makes it, let's say shaky, for a 
system with slightly non-standard needs (no graphics or multiple networks). 
However iptables (firewall) and SELinux seem to make no trouble in that 
context.

I need to confirm all this and will post a reliable analysis later to this 
list.

Cheers
 									Dirk