CVS for student shared projects

[Eddie Irvine]

Hi Everyone,
 
Is CVS a good tool for group projects? I work at a university,
and our third years have to work on group projects - about
4 to a group, maybe 50 groups or so each semester.
 
Apart from cvs, the other option is making 50 samba shares, but
then if we want Unix as well as windows access things get messy.

I can write some scripts (perl or python) to set all of this
up and take it down again each semester. 
 
I'm leaning towards CVS. Will probably set up a CVS server on 
a seperate FreeBSD/OpenBSD or Linux box somewhere.

Is this dumb/clueless or probably OK? 

I'm a moderately experience unix admin, but a cvs newbie. I'm
currently RTF{surprisingly-well-written}M.
 
I guess the only thing that causes me some concern is the password
field - I'd rather get them from NIS or LDAP.
 
Eddie.