problem specifying port to ssh

[Don Cohen]

Damien Miller writes:
 > It looks like your /etc/nsswitch.conf or one of the supporting libraries
 > is messed up - it is failing inside a getaddrinfo() call, probably 
 > in /lib/libnss_nisplus.so.2

I actually did look at that.
This from dired of /etc
  -rw-r--r--    1 root    root      1750 Sep  8  2005 nsswitch.conf
  -rw-r--r--    1 root    root      1696 Sep 22  2004 nsswitch.conf.rpmnew
suggests that on Sep 8 that file was replaced.
But that's too long ago to account for the problem, since I do use 
ssh -p fairly regularly.
The difference between the two files is that the current one contains
 files nisplus
in a lot of places where the other contains only
 files

But I don't understand how this is related to supplying a port.