Setting passswd on RHEL

I was trying to reset the password on the newly installed build machine.

I logged in as root and tried changing the password.

when I did passwd<use-name>
A error was to pop-up saying:
"passwd: Authentication token manipulation error"

After lot of googling I came to know that the command passwd was trying to update the nis password for the user-name, who never was a NIS user.

The worksaround for this issue:
comment out passwd and group lines in ./etc/nsswitch.conf file.
for the changes to take affect run pwconv command.

Its better to make a copy of original file before inflicting any changes in the system files.

Now try changing the passwd, it should go through fine.