I'm not the most experienced Linux person, mainly because I've fallen into the trap of SuSE and it's easy admin tools.

I have a few (6 or so) Linux boxes on my network. I would like them to authenticate (user and group lists and passwords) from a central source. I have a machine ready for the task.

1) What system is easiest to use in a multi-distro environment? I don't need directory information features and all that, just users, groups, and passwords, and also centralized storage of permissions (i.e. I create a user called "webmaster" on the central server that automatically has access to /srv/www on every machine that has that). I also need to be able to assign rights on a machine-by-machine basis. I.e. user "sunadmin" has full priviliges of a certain group on a machine called "sun" but not on a machine called "moon". I have mainly SuSE Linux right now, but also plan to try *BSD, OpenSolaris, and CentOS. I need something that will work with the majority of them.

2) I would also like something that is relatively quick to setup on new machines.

3) I need some level of backup on each machine at the local level. It's ok if nobody but root can login if the auth server is down, but I need system services/users such as wwwrun to continue to function.

****Lastly, and most importantly:
I've never worked with anything like this before. I really need a recommendation of a good book or web site that can walk me through every step of configuring this and setting up user permissions.

I tried both LDAP and NIS. I got the LDAP server working but couldn't figure out the directory scheme. I figured out how to get NIS to serve authentication information, but couldn't get it working.

Thanks.

i'd very strongly suggest the use of OpenLDAP. there is certinaly nothign at all that is OS specific, indeed no form of centralized authenticaion will be os specific, so i'd stop worrying too much about that. ldap still serves well for a simple user base if you don't wish to make use of a larger structure.