I have an application server with several xterminals connecting to it. Sometimes I want to NFS from the application server to the xterminals. Also on the network I am going to have some type of IPCop firewall through which I would like to record user activitiy. The question before me is how to I authenticate all this.

In a way I have centralised my user authentication because they all login to the one Slackware application server. I would also like to centralise authentication for NFS use, but people scream at me that NIS is insecure. And as for the firewall, it would be good to use something like ident to record user activity on that, but again, security is an issue. PAM, what is that, and anyway, is that the best direction considering the method is not in vanilla Slackware (No Dropline please). LDAP: I'm still learning how to spell that.

So, as you can see I need to authenticate but don't know how. Do you know of any reference that compares authentication methods.

Regards

Fogwatch.