How to Configure a Remote Home Directory on Mac OS X?

I have an iMac, an XP box, and a Windows Server 2003 home server. I don't have active directory set up.

To make a remote home directory on XP, I remapped the My Documents directory to a remote file share, and used TweakUI to change the default directory for music, photos, etc to the sub directories of the remote My Documents share.

On my iMac, things were MUCH more difficult. I ended up installing Windows Services for Unix (1) on the the 2003 server and configuring an NFS automount using the Directory utility on OS X. I then changed my OS X user account's home directory to the automounted NFS share.

This solution is sub-optimal. The trash does not work for any of my files because they are on a remote drive. If I lose connectivity to the server, OS X grinds to a halt because it can no longer access the ~/Library directory. Finally, NFS sporadically drops and automount fails to remount the share, forcing a reboot.

There has to be a better way to make this work. Apple claims that OS X plays friendly on a Windows network. How have you gotten OS X to reliably use a remote network share for the home directory? Is this even possible?

(1) http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/interopmigration/bb380242.aspx

Coincidentally, just the other day I was researching some articles about doing this.

I've not attempted it yet, but these (along with the MCXRedirector one mentioned in the comment above - that looks useful too) should give you some pointers.

• Portable Home Directory over NFS on OSX authenticated via OpenLDAP on Debian Linux
• Forcing portable homes to sync ~/Library