Integrating NIS Linux authentication and WordPress logins

Hey folks,

I’m an administrator with a college computing group, and we have a large number of users all with NIS accounts on our system.

Does anyone know if it would be possible to get WordPress to use the usernames and passwords from the NIS authentication system in place of its built in database?

In particular, we’d like to use WPMU to offer all of our users blogs—but we want to insist that everyone get a system account first, and using the same list of users would be quite a bit easier.

Thoughts/suggestions? I’m guessing no one has done something like this. Any suggestion for souces?