network users and home directories

A different user ID and different short name are necessary.

 

To your first question:
Correct, any network user's you want to log in with need to have different UID's and short names from local users. The local computer always looks to itself first then to any directories it's bound to for authentication. If it finds a local user with the same short name as the network user you're logging in with it will log into the local user account, not the network one.

Second Question:
What is the Home Folder location set too in Server? If it's set to "Local Only" or "/Users/username" in WorkGroup Manager your files will only reside on the local HD of whatever computer you log into with your network account. A new Home Folder will be created in /Users of whatever machine you log into. Nothing is synced back to the Server.

If your Home Folder location is set to a share point on your Server, then your files will reside in that folder on the Server and your computer will access them in real time from the Server while you are logged in. You will need to maintain a constant active network connection to the Server for everything to work correctly. The files will reside only on the Server in this case.

You can create a Mobile Home Folder once logged into your network account, which will sync a copy of your Home Folder between the Server and the local HD. I've had mixed results with this though and it can cause Login and Log Out to take a long time depending on how much you're syncing.

 

The client needs to be able to resolve the server's IP address or name. If you've assigned the server a name that's something like "server.home.private" your client won't find that unless it's pointed to the DNS that is running on your server. In these cases, yes, you need to add the server's IP address as a DNS server on the client.

 

Check out the videos of Todd Olthoff on youtube. He explains everything pretty straight forward about OS X server.

 

Different names will accomplish this, I believe you could simply give the network user a different password than your local user account. The computer will try to authenticate against the local user accounts first and will go on to try the bound directory server if it doesn't find a successful login in the local accounts.