Programs and NFS Mounts

I've worked with lots of network-based Mac users that have their home directory mounted via NFS. This makes it easy to save all of their data to a centralized server and gives them the freedom to roam to other systems and still have access to all of their files.

It works fine for most situations, but I have noticed a few issues.

App Store will download an app but never install it.
Adobe Acrobat will never finish the first-run initialization.
Google Chrome will be unable to setup auto-updating.
Microsoft Outlook 2011 will not be able to search messages, and eventually just corrupt itself and no longer open.

Even if the network user is setup as a local admin, many programs just wont work with an NFS home.

The issue was permissions. If you monitor the Console (Applications -> Utilities), you will see background programs crashing.
MoverTool crashes with Adobe Acrobat, installd crashes with App Store, etc.

One of the crash error messages (with installd) is EXC_BAD_ACCESS. That is what gave me the first hint that something couldn't read/write where it was trying to.

My user had full rights to their home folder. However, local root did not. And that is apparently what these background tasks run with the privilege level of.

The default NFS setting was to map "Root to Nobody" (as it should be). However, I had to set it to "Root to Root" to get the many applications to work.