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  On the other hand, it seems like NIS is old, inflexible, outdated, and possibly nearing end of life.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