Never heard of such a thing, just like _martin. I've been using a dedicated file system mounted on /home, and /usr/home doesn't even exist on my machine, and everything works fine. Unix has a long history that a user's home directory can be pretty much anywhere, as long as it is correctly recorded in /etc/passwd, and the $HOME environment variable is set. I've worked on small machines (where user "bob" will have his home directory on /home/bob), and on gigantic machine (clusters) where the home directory of user bob in group f13 of division ec might be /h/ec/f13/bob. Comes down to ease of administration.On FreeBSD /home is a symbolic link to /usr/home. I have read that some applications rely on such convention.
Is there any documentation that states that user's home directories need to be in a specific place? "Man hier" doesn't mention it at all. I think FreeBSD by itself doesn't care at all.
On the workstation that contains the pool with the /export/home, should I access it via a symbolic link as Mjölnir suggested or mount it for consistency with the access from other computers?
Good question. Try this argument: Be consistent. Is the machine that exports the home directory primarily a login machine, where users would log in just as usual, and it's a place they can do work just like on the other machines? Then I would say: Put the home directories there in /home, export it from there (there is no rule that exported file systems have to be in /exports), and on the client machines, mount it as /home. Then users can't even tell the difference, and that's good.
On the other hand, if the exporting machine had separate home directories (/export/home is not used on it), then it would make sense for it to have /export/home for things it exports via NFS, and a separate /home for people to get work done locally, I don't think that's what you want.
Use the KISS principle, and try to be consistent.