So you want a mounted share, not synced directories. That works fine...until it doesn't.
One challenge was always what to do when the network/server is not available, as nobody can work on anything.
Another challenge (historically) has been that some files can behave weirdly if they try to write temp/cache/auto-save files locally when working on networked drives. Testing is in order to verify with the types of files required.
If a lot of users want to work on the same files often, the limitations of file-locking (only one user can edit, and others have read-only access) may also be challenging too.
The scenario is me, in my own studio, where I have multiple Macs and iOS devices of differing ages & OS versions, and will be introducing some Linux and or Windows machines. The server (Synology) being unavailable won't effect my ability to work, because if it's unavailable I'll be attending to the server.
But that's right, the goal would be to have automountng server volumes to replace the task-dedicated hard drives that I currently have mounted inside my Mac Pro, or attached to it via USB.
Because of challenges like these, along with distributed workforces and WAN connection difficulties...the world is generally moving to synced files or cloud-based tools ala Google Workspaces or Office365 stuff. Even Apple finally made their iWork suite web collaborative-friendly.
I'm using iCloud for stuff iCloud does well - iCloud sync of app states etc. But I'm not going to use a cloud service to allow multiple computers in one place to work on 400GB layered TIFF files.
Another issue might be that Apple is pretty particular with home user directory permissions. I would really test that hard before rollout.
Oh I've been playing with that - even relocating the home directory onto a different volume from the boot drive plays merry havoc with things, despite following every tutorial I can find.
It's been many years, but last I saw, if there was a network home, and the server did not mount for any reason, a new local home was created via the default template (same as any new user account creation) which can get super messy.
In a former life, when I wasn an Apple-certified OSX Server Admin back in the Tiger days, we used to set this stuff up, and it was really nice, but yeah, not the way Apple wants to go with things.
If either of these is still an issue, network homes would be a bag of pain. That would point back to mounted folders for specific shared data, not entire (or mostly) home directories.
Yeah, so I'm not doing network homes. The goal is to have each machine containing only its operating system, and the local machine user accounts, but with, I guess
personality stuff - iMessage, Safari bookmarks, reading app states etc synced via iCloud, as all the machines are logged into one iCloud account.
Documents, media etc - all the stuff that isn't in ~/Library however - the goal was to have that on the Synology.
Take for example my Aperture, or iTunes libraries - the working preferences for the application is stored on each machine ~/Library/Preferences, so that's unique to every machine, and set up specifically to suit each machine, how many displays it has etc. But the Library files, which contain the metadata and organisation, and the actual structured media files, their place is on the server, so they can be interacted with by any machine on which I'm logged in.
That's the sort of thing I'm trying to do.
But the big unknowns as I see them are to do with versioned backups - I know Synology does them internally (possibly only when using BTRFS?) but what's the UI for interacting with this etc, and can it be used in a way equivalent to Time Machine for restoring older versions of files etc.
