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I am looking for a way to set this up. I have a Debian server which I use to hold my home directory for my user account. I used to use Windows 7 and connect to my /home/username directory via Samba which worked great. I could access all of my files as if they were sitting on my local PC, but they were actually sitting on my Debian server.

Now I have decided to give Ubuntu 10.10 a try (looks promising so far!). One thing I'm not sure how to do is to mount my home directory from my server! I am able to open an sftp connection to my server, but not able to access them natively as they were /home/username on my local machine. I'm assuming I need to mount my home directory somewhere in my fstab before it starts up, but which protocol should I use? I'm used to using windows networking, but am trying to get more into linux. Should I use NFS? I'm assuming not Samba? Any direction would be appreciated!

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Either NFS or Samba is fine; the only difference between the two is how you specify the credentials (as in, NFS has none).

The bigger problem will be the difference between UIDs and GIDs across the systems. You'll want to set up something like LDAP so that all systems will use the same IDs.

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With a unix server and a unix client, I'd recommend NFS, which understands more unix metadata than samba, and which is easier to set up if you have the same UIDs and GIDs on both sides. – Gilles Oct 17 '10 at 11:38
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Even if your file-server is in the same LAN, sshfs is comparatively easy to set up (man sshfs), so you may want to give that a shot. Additionally, if you have a remote file-server, you will benefit from the encryption.

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