Time machine on a network drive

The situation:
We have a Mac Pro with a Time Machine volume on an external drive that is  attached to a networked Mac. I don't think this is a very common scenario, but it works just fine over a gigabit network. We do not automount any drives on the networked machine but mount (or connect to) this remote machine manually whenever the Mac Pro in question is restarted (which is not often).
The question:
Due to some renovation, we'd like to temporarily connect this external drive to the Mac Pro and mount the Time Machine Volume. Will Time Machine find the correct sparse bundle on the external drive, recognize it as an existing Time Machine backup and update that as long as needed. In other words, the external drive will have a different unix path name, but the sparse bundle will have the correct name.  And when the renovation is done, we will resume running Time Machine over the network, and I hope that Time Machine will again do the right thing.
I want to avoid having Time Machine's creating a new backup when the unix path changes.
Thanks.

In the past Apple was not holding you hostage by requiring you to use a Time Capsule for network Time Machine backups. Search on Google for Time machine NAS OS X (or something like that) You will find a number of drives that were working with SL.
Now, they did change the file protocol in Lion, so some of the NAS servers won't work with Lion, at the moment. So long as it is a decent company that makes the NAS they should be releasing a firmware update to get their NAS working with Lion.
One of the companies that put out a press release was Western Digital. They said they would be working on an updated firmware so that you could use it as a Time Machine drive.
Just look around the interwebs and I am sure you will find several that will work.

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