Home Directory on server or client?

I work for an architects firm (about a dozen people) and we currently keep user accounts/home directories on individual machines, although we have a server. What are the advantages, besides being able to log into your account from any machine, in keeping the home directories/user accounts on the server?
And what are the disadvantages? And what about laptop users?
Or should I be looking at mobile home directories, in which case I'd ask the same relative questions as above?

We are an architecture firm also, with a total of 8 employes.
We have network home directories set up (I did not set it up) but have had no problems. We do not have Portable home directories setup, as there is no need. Our boss is the only one that uses a laptop and no need to work from home. It is very handy to have user accounts available at any machine, as there are sometimes when we need to get some repair done on a tower, we just pull an old one out of storage, or move to an empty desk. When we get a new computer, I just image it with our base image, and it s in production in an hour or so.
The main reason for the dir. on the server is due to backups. We nightly backup our entire server to firewire drive then rotate weekly. This gets all user information, email, as well as all of our working data.
As for "intense server usage" our server is a G4 PPC MDD 1.25 Ghz with 1.25 GB of ram running Server 10.4.7. During the day, there area anywhere from 4-7 clients connected to the server, but our CPU stays well under 20%. It only peaks during backups, @ night.
Services running are :AFP, DHCP, NetBoot, NFS, OpenDirectory (Master), and VPN.
We have also setup VPN, so we can work from home, or admin remotely.
Our main files used are Vectorworks files, ranging from 10-50 MB, but some Photoshop files that get large.
Anyway, that is my experience, take what you want. I was thrown into the sysadmin after coming on out of Architecture school, and it is a balancing act to keep the system working while keeping my billable hours high.
Spinner
Mac Pro 2.66 Ghz   Mac OS X (10.4.7)  

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    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.

    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.

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