Simple, centralized user management on a small LAN - NIS or LDAP?

Solution 1:

I don't think anybody uses NIS anymore - or at least, wants to.

The fastest and easiest way to get a nice LDAP+Kerberos environment up is FreeIPA. It's easy and light enough that I even use it at home.

Red Hat's Identity Management Guide is a great introduction to FreeIPA and will get you up and running quickly.

Note that while Ubuntu has FreeIPA, the version in 12.04 LTS is older and may have bugs or missing features compared to more recent versions.

Solution 2:

IAR (Internet Account Replication) is what you are looking for. It is mostly a shell script, and it's very easy to use. It uses SSH for transport -- no portmapper/RPC ugliness like NIS, and it uses GPG for verification. It has been used in production on Ubuntu and Redhat. It is no LDAP, so it definitely is not intended for all purposes...but it replaces NIS for most uses, and it is really easy to setup. That said, I'm one of the authors of the quick pretty elegant hack that IAR is, so I might be a tad biased.

The docs, a .deb repo, and online source code browser are available at iar.hcn-inc.com. RPMs and a tarball can be downloaded from sourceforge.net