Thanks eyoungren. This thread inspired me to write my final blog post for the Second Annual Winter PowerPC Challenge! (January 1-8, 2018) ...
http://hoop-la.ca/powerpc/2018/#server
Read your post. Glad to see you are doing the same thing.
I do want to make one comment though since you stated that you don't see a difference between OS X client sharing a folder or drive and OS X server.
Having been on both ends I can tell you some of what the differences are.
With just the client, when you write a file on a network share you have to have permission. That's fine if it's just you or someone else and you've granted the access to each account. It's also fine if you disable permissions on a drive.
But if you have multiple users writing many files to a share, say a group of graphic designers working on InDesign documents, unless you disable permissions entirely or monkey around with groups then whatever user writes a file retains the permissions to it. On a client computer sharing a drive that means NO ONE ELSE can access that file! That's a problem if you are trying to share multiple files between users.
And no business organization is going to be happy with disabling ownership on a volume or forcing multiple users to use ONE user account in order to solve this problem. Which also brings up another problem. If you have multiple users logged in under one account (so all have read/write access) what happens when multiple users open the same file, save at the same time or do other tasks simultaneously?
What happens is file loss and corruption.
OS X client is not designed to handle this sort of thing.
OS X server on the other hand allows this by letting you assign multiple users to groups and allowing those groups different kinds of access. Server locks a file when it's open so other users cannot open it. Server releases the file when done and allows others to open, modify and save. ACLS, which OS X server can do, is even finer grain control.
OS X server has Active Directory and Home Folders. You can bind your server to the Active Directory domain of a Windows Server, allowing all the users in that AD domain to access your server with their credentials.
Need to let a user use multiple Macs as if they were all the SAME? Home Folders. All your data in your home folder is stored on the server and no matter what Mac you use it's the same.
Client can't offer any of this, or do it in any reasonable fashion.
There are other things, such as firewalls, VPN, Radius Servers, Update Servers, NAT, DHCP, DNS, etc that client can't offer or that requires third party software.
Just wanted to point out some basic differences.
