Cause

After installing patches 104331-04 and 103612-33, nis_cachemgr(1M) failed to come up. The symptoms are as follows during the reboot:

Sep 11 16:34:00 nis_cachemgr: Error in reading NIS cold start file : '/var/nis/NIS_COLD_START'

and nis_cachemgr(1M) isn't there after logging in. Trussing nis_cachemgr(1M) showed that it is reading /var/nis/NIS_COLD_START and immediately reporting an error. Neither reinitializing the client nor copying NIS_COLD_START helps.