I don’t think anybody uses NIS anymore – or at least, wants to.
The fastest and easiest way to get a nice LDAP+Kerberos environment up is FreeIPA. It’s easy and light enough that I even use it at home.
Red Hat’s Identity Management Guide is a great introduction to FreeIPA and will get you up and running quickly.
Note that while Ubuntu has FreeIPA, the version in 12.04 LTS is older and may have bugs or missing features compared to more recent versions.