More than one network home directory? (newbie question)

Question

I have a brand new shiny XServer for a small school. They wanted their Macs managed and secured so I eagerly started moving ahead with it. Now, because of the specific file sharing requirements of the school (teachers want access to student accounts and files for homework and such) I created a standard, by-the-book Network Home folder. Then I thought about it, and I shared another directory as a Network User Home folder. And now none of my networked user accounts can log in. They all give me "can't log in, there is an error".
Is what I did possible? Allowed? Recommended? Discouraged? Can you actually define two separate Network User Home folders on the same server, and then assign different users to different home folders? My server crapped out and now I may have to wipe/reinstall the whole thing to fix it.
Does anybody have any experience with home folders like that?
Any information would be dearly appreciated,
Thanks.

Answer 1

Each user can have one and only one home directory, network or local. (Yes, even if you use Mobile Accounts or Portable Homes each account still has one home directory. You just have multiple copies of the user account and each copy has one home.)
You can have multiple share points that serve as home directory share points. In other words, not all of your users' homes need to be stored in the same place. By "network home directory share point," we mean a shared folder (share point) that has a corresponding dynamic automount record in the directory domain. The share point mounts at /Network/Servers/servername/path/to/sharepoint, and users defined in the directory domain can have their network homes defined there.
If you want to grant a group of teachers (let's call it teachers for simplicity) read/write access to student home directories, I'd suggest the following strategy:
1. Create two network home directory share points - one to house the students' homes and one to house the teachers' homes. For this example, let's say that the student home directory share point is located at /Volumes/Disk1/StudentHomes.
2. Create home directories for each student as you normally would.
3. Then add an ACL that allows members of the teachers group to read/write within the student home directory share point. For our example:
sudo chmod -R +ai "group:teachers allow readattr,readextattr,readsecurity,list,search,\
read,execute,writeattr,writeextattr,delete,deletechild,add_file,addsubdirectory,\
write,append,fileinherit,directoryinherit" /Volumes/Disk1/StudentHomes.
4. Now teachers simply navigate to /Network/Servers/yourservername/path.../StudentHomes/student's name and dig around to find what they want. (The teachers have read/write control of all student home directories now.)
5. When your teachers find it a little inconvenient to dig around in each student's home, suggest the following alternative: Simply create a share point to which students have read-only access and teachers can read/write. Within that share point, create "turn-in" folders for each teacher or class, and give students write-only (drop box) permission to the sub-folder. You could get more granular than this simple example where all students can turn anything into any teacher's "turn-in" folder, though.
--Gerrit