Linux password server?

[Kenneth Burgener]

Maybe someone could point me in the right direction.  I have several
Linux servers, and maintaining users and passwords  individually across
all of them is getting to be painful.  So I am hoping to find a "Linux
password server" option that I can manage all users and passwords from. 
Google didn't appear to be much help, and kept pointing me to using
Samba (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=linux+password+server).  I
have heard there are several security issues with the Windows
authentication, and it seems overkill to use a Windows based
authentication scheme in a pure Linux environment.  Is there a simple,
secure and lightweight Linux way of doing this (and by lightweight I
mean staying away from LDAP overkill as well).

Any suggestions?

If it helps, all of the servers are running Fedora Core 5 (64bit).

Thanks,
Kenneth