Distributed authentication. Which one?

[Peter Clutton]

On 10/14/05, Francisco Reyes <lists at natserv.com> wrote:
> I inherited a number of machines and now have to deal with maintaining a
> small set of users accros 20 machines.
> Currently using MySQL accross different machines, but not shared. Would
> like to have a single way to authenticate all email users accross all
> machines.
>
> Preferably a distributed system which can run on top of PostgreSQL.

Well questions of which one are all a matter of opinion. LDAP is an
established implementation of the .x500 standard, and the open version
OpenLDAP can run with a mysql backend. It sounds like it would fulfil
your needs.

Kerberos is an authentication protocol rather than a directory
service, and NIS is a simple directory service introduced by Sun.

Hope that helps!