slightly off-topic: Central Auth

Hey everyone,

I apologize in advance for going slightly off topic, but I have never
setup a centralized authentication scheme under Linux. My question is,
what do most people do for centralized command line, X, and PG
authentication? From what I've read the main choices are NIS or LDAP.
LDAP would be problematic as I would have to embed a login and plain
text password in the ldap.conf file for binding to the MS AD. On the
other hand, it seems like NIS is old, inflexible, outdated, and possibly
nearing end of life. We are a largely Windows shop with many app and
database servers running Linux. The Linux environment is growing too
large not to do centralized authentication of some kind.

At this point I'm open to suggestions or comments. SSH and X are
required, PG would be nice to be able to auth centrally as well while
I'm at it.

Thanks,

Scot Kreienkamp