Can ssh into client iMac but cannot mount home directory ...

Question

I've got a server running 10.4.11 and a bunch of client iMacs (10.5.n). If I ssh into a client iMac it lets me log in but cannot mount my home directory (which lives on the server). Obviously ssh is getting my credentials from the server but isn't getting (or cannot get) the information to mount my disk. If I log in through the gui on the client it all works fine. I suspect this is less of an error and more of a design. Is there a way to get the clients to mount my home when logging in with ssh? If not then Apple presumably has a reason for disallowing this behaviour. Is there a way around this? Perhaps with mount_afp?
We want to be able to log into many client iMacs at once to run computations on them. Eventually we want to do this on a suite of XServes and XGrid. This is all very easy with linux and nfs and I was expecting the same sort of ability through OS X. I know that I can export everything from the server with nfs (though that may not solve my problem) but I only have the one system and multiple users and I can't really experiment while they are connected.
Suggestions? Comments? If there are obvious examples of this elsewhere please point me toward them.

Answer 1

Well it's never worked that way for me. Do you actually use this method to log in?
I've gone through all of the server logs, watching what gets added as I log on to a client. I don't see anything there that suggests it is even attempting to mount the home directory. I also watched on the client and didn't see any errors. When I ssh into a client I see the following message on the terminal, "Could not chdir to home directory /Network/Servers/server.some.place/Volumes/R1/UsersR1/username: Unknown error: 118" This suggests that the client knows where my home should be but doesn't know how to mount it.
I have enabled the basic setup on my server. User accounts have Home URLs like "afp://server.some.place/UsersR1/username" and Full Paths like "/Network/Servers/server.some.place/Volumes/R1/UsersR1" (R1 is a RAID disk). UsersR1 has been made into a Share Point and Server Admin tells me that the disk "will be automatically mounted using the AFP protocol as /Network/Servers/R1 on client machines". This part doesn't seem to be true as when I log into a client through the GUI the actual path that is mounted as my home is /Network/Servers/server.some.place/R1" (pwd in my home directory returns /Network/Servers/server.some.place/Volumes/R1/UsersR1/username which is a actually rather inconvenient).
Under the Advanced tab in the Workgroup Manager, Accounts pane, I've got "Allow simultaneous login on managed computers". This seems to work but also seems only to apply to the GUI, that is I can log onto several clients at once.
How do I ask a client machine what home directory information it is getting from the server for any particular user? Is there some setup on the client machines that will enable automatic mounting of homes through ssh? On the clients, the Directory Utility, which I have used to connect the client to a Directory Server, has a Mounts pane which allows me to "Edit automatic NFS mounts for this computer". I am not exporting any NFS from the server, but perhaps this is the way to make it work?
Perhaps what I want to requires Kerberos? I don't have that enabled.
When I have done this on a cluster of linux machines I exported the home directory from the server with NFS (exportfs) and then, using NIS and automount on the clients it "just worked". It was very simple. If it is supposed to work with Macs and OS X, it may be simple but it's not obvious.