Q: Trying to understand HT203325: Don‘t log in to the server with a network user‘s account

Try it.   But I would not expect what you're trying to do will be reliable, and I would not recommend using a server as an interactive workstation — the two tasks are generally at cross-purposes.

If you want shared file storage, activate that on OS X client, or install and use a NAS box.   There's no need for server, if network storage is the goal.

Running a server means setting up DNS services locally, and a variety of other tasks.   It used to be possible to mostly get away without doing that, but 10.5 started to get flaky without local DNS services, and network authentication and security are now commonplace, and that doesn't work at all well without local DNS.

Servers are also expected to be available all the time, and — as often happens — shared systems can be rather less stable as software is changed, the systems are shut down, or otherwise.

NFS has been available on OS X for many years, and some folks have manually configured remote access via NFS.   It's much more common to see AFP and increasingly CIFS/SMB used, though.

From HT203325: Users can be local as is typical of most OS X client configurations, or they can be what are known as network users — users with their login directory located elsewhere, and often with access and the same password across multiple systems.   If the users are configured as network users of the server, then don't allow those users to log directly into the server.   That — the server serving files and directories from itself back to itself — isn't reliable.  Not per that tech note, and not per what I've encountered.

We run a system at home, similar to what you want to setup. It consist of a Mini (2012), iMac (2013), two MBP's (2010,2012), 2 iPad's and iPhone and iPod Touch. The network is provided by a Time Capsule and two Airport Expresses. The system runs DNS, OD, caching, file sharing, mail, calendar, contacts and we use Profile Manager as the MDM. The Mini serves mainly as a media server with Tunespan across various drives. We have 4 users in our household.

The Tech article states that you should avoid logging on to the server with a user account whose home directory is hosted on the server. This means that the home directory of that user should be hosted on another Mac. When doing that, the mounting and unmounting is not an issue, and the server serves all shares. Admittedly, we also don't do extensive Video at home, but we do simultaneously sometimes watch different things from the local net and or the internet without any problems.

It is worth a try as MrHoffman indicated. It works for us.

Leo

In no particular order...

Whether you are not IT or don't have familiarity with IT, you are on a path that means somebody locally will be providing IT.   OS X Server is easier to manage than many other servers, but it's still a server and still requires some knowledge of DNS and IP networking, certificates and some other tasks.

What you're looking for will work, modulo network users logging into the server locally; self-serving.

The OS X Server tools are wildly different from the era of Tiger and Leopard — I got away with quite a lot back then, in terms of the setups, and the tools allowed great flexibility.  The newer tools are far simpler, and the configurations far more constrained.  The security expectations are far higher now, too.   Both fortunately and unfortunately, the OS X Server tools have gotten vastly simpler starting at 10.7. The detailed manuals are only for the older tools — here's the old User Management manual, which discusses the background on what you're centrally interested in, including network users and Portable Home Directory users, etc.   (With recent OS X Server releases, the network and PHD users have effectively been merged, too.  Work Group Manager.app and Server Admin.app are gone.)   Keep scrolling through the servers and enterprise manuals for others for 10.6 manuals, and see the help text in Server.app for the current documentation. 

The underlying software mechanisms are largely the same, the UI is much different, and much simpler.

Shared credentials means OS X Server with Open Directory, or Windows Server with Microsoft Active Directory, or analogous.

More than a few data files are not intended to be shared on OS X — the first storage engineers that I encountered that were offering controller-level storage replication and synchronization back in the 1980s got it wrong, and the current generation of storage folks are still getting it wrong to this day.  It's not an easy problem, and both the OS and the applications must to be involved in getting a consistent and correct copy of the application data.   Otherwise, you might get lucky, or you might get inconsistent data.  Apps that only work with one file can be somewhat easier to backup or to clone here, and apps that use a database — so long as the backup tools or the clone tools coordinate with the database — can usually be copied or cloned reliably.   But most storage controllers and more than a few clone tools do not communicate directly with nor work with database software.   This applies across approaches based on tools such as rsync, and to mechanisms built into higher-end storage controllers, and other such.    Which means that getting reliable copies is a tough problem.   This is also part of why folks often synch their home directories at logout.   But I digress.

With local servers, you must set up DNS services locally, as attempts to reference ISP or public DNS won't work for hosts on a NAT.   With either OS X Server or Active Directory — or pretty much anything else similar — this means setting up one or more DNS servers on your local network.  DNS should be the first service established on a server, if there isn't another DNS infrastructure active for the local network — ISP and public DNS servers cannot provide this.   Don't skip this step, as the errors here tend to be pernicious.

You're looking for a one-host all-in-one workstation-as-a-server configuration, and that's not what Apple intends for OS X Server.