Rt-3.8 PAM/NIS authentication on CentOS Linux

Greetings,

I am trying to upgrade my SuSE 10 rt-3.6 installation to rt-3.8 on
CentOS 5.2.

The SuSE installation authenticates users against our NIS maps via
PAM using Authen::Simple::PAM within Apache. This arrangement
does not work on CentOS because authentication via Authen::Simple::PAM
fails unless the effective user is root (Apache runs as nobody).

Can anyone tell me how to make PAM/NIS authentication for RT work
securely on CentOS 5.2?
Gary Hall