How do I put my home folder on a USB hard drive?

Hello everyone. I'd like to store my home folder on a portable USB2 hard drive so that I can carry it between work and home. Does anyone know how to set up MacOS X (Leopard) so that it stores the Users folder on an external drive? I know it's possible. I'm not interested in a syncing solution. I want OS X to look for home directories on my USB drive.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
-Rob

In Tiger it was possible to mount a different partition/disk over the /Users directory by using the LABEL=disklabel in /etc/fstab and netinfo database. I found this not working anymore. I had to mount my second /Users partition explicitly by giving the disk device in the /etc/fstab. So, this won't work for you as you don't know which disk your USB drive is, I guess.
What remains would be to set the home directory of a particular user to a place on the USB drive. This must be done for every user you would like, one by one. I'm not sure this is fine for you, but anyhow it can be done by the directory service command line tool which replaces the netinfo service.
Start a Terminal and type
dscl . -read /Users/<short name of user> NFSHomeDirectory
will return you the home directory. To change it
sudo dscl . -create /Users/<short name of user> NFSHomeDirectory /path-to-your-USB-home-directory.
Try it without deleting your actual home directory (so you can change it back . What is unclear to me is what happens when the user logs in and the drive is not connected. You should definitely try such things out. A further thing to think about is SENSITIVE data. Be cautious on what you're carrying around on your USB drive! On a laptop I would install FileVault but I'm not sure this works well from an USB drive. Remember a USB drive is ways slower...
Good luck,
Thomas

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