Server user names/accounts verus local machine user accounts

Question

Sorry, I seem to be having some fog on this in setting up a new server. Existing Mac computers, so local computers have users/passwords already setup. In creating users on the new server, I still want want users to access their local directories/files on their local machines - but we want access to server services too.
Question: use the same user name/passwords as local machine in setting up server users - or something different?
Thanks very much - Lewis

Answer 1

This is a difficult question to answer given the information available.
In general though, I would refrain from setting up both a local and a network account with the same username. It causes confusion since you never know which account you're really using, you will have problem matching UIDs (which is what's really used to track file ownership) and you will have problems when users change passwords (assuming they ever do) because they'll change it locally but it won't have any effect on the server-side services.
So I would probably look to move ALL the accounts to the network directory. You can still use local home directories in this scenario, but it will take some time to migrate all users, ensuring they maintain access to their files after their UID changes.
The above does depend on what services you're running, though, so it might not be worth the hassle, depending on those services, number of users, etc.