Is there any good way for using a network account locally on the server?

We have a bunch of macs at home. I want to be able to login to a laptop and have my account (home dir) in sync with de desktop account in a noninvasive way.

For achieving this I thought promoting one imac to be a network profile server would be a good solution.

This way we can work on any machine and sync portable home directories (phd) with our laptops.

The server should also be usable as a workstation.

One problem is: is possible to login on the server (locally) and work in a network account?

I know it is possible, but this article describes issues.

Also i am concerned about perfomance because files wil be mounted over afp rather than being on the harddisk. (one workaround would be to have a phd on the desktop, this would however not be possible on the server itsself (unless you have two copies of the home directory there))

Does anyone have any experience with a simular situation or perhaps some other helpfull insights.