Basic network logins

What's the easiest way to set up network logins?

This is for my home system. I have 4 users, and a handful of computers,
and it seems that I am forever chasing user IDs and group IDs around.

I have NFS running, but I'm having a heck of a time getting NIS/NIS+/NYS
running. The NIS Howto isn't very helpful to me (I think it's just my lack
of the overall NIS picture that's the problem, not the NIS Howto itself...)

I'd just like to have a very simple, basic setup where my server handles
all of the login verifications. Is there a really basic NIS Howto
somewhere to tell me the minimum that needs to be running on the server
and on each client?

TIA,

--Kamus