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Renaming network shares in Finder

R

RupertJ

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Dec 30, 2004
28
0
Bristol, UK
Hi all,

I use a mac mini at work to manage a bunch of web servers, each of which has a shared folder called 'web' for the web root.

When they're all mounted, I can't tell the damn things apart! Is there anything I can do to get them displayed as 'web on servername' or similar?

Renaming the shares on each server isn't an option ;)

Cheers!
 
If you can't rename a volume on the server, then it would be a really bad idea to rename the volume remotely. You need to find a Plan B.
 
Ok, maybe I didn't explain that very well....

I don't want to alter anything on the servers at all. All I want is a method for telling identically named network shares apart. At the moment, if you look at my sidebar in finder I get Macintosh HD, Web, Web, Web, Web. As you may imagine, this isn't very useful.
 
I'm slowly discovering that the integration between Finder and samba is damn weird...

I've tried mounting one of my network shares to a folder on my desktop (With the mount point given the name of the server) using:

mount_smbfs -W DOMAIN //username:password@Server1/web ~/Desktop/Web/Server1

Now this kinda works. The FS gets mounted (I can see it in the terminal) but the mount point disappears from the finder. If I mess about in ~/Desktop/Web for a bit, the mount point reappears and I can finally see the content.

The share gets added as /Volumes/Web too, which has me puzzled.

If anyone knows how to stop the mount point temporarily disappearing, I'd be most grateful.
 
How much effort are you willing to put into this. I started researching a solution for giving the web shares different icons.

I'm thinking you should be able to give a folder an icon by modifying the correct hidden files in that folder. The Icon? file seems to be clue. There are some problems, though. The icon information sits in the resource fork of the Icon? file, and this may cause a problem on mounted shares. I'm having a very hard time figuring out how the Icon? files work. If I copy a folder with cp -R the icon comes a long, but if I create a new folder and then copy in a Icon? file with ditto or with cp using ../namedfork for the resource fork, it doesn't work in either case. I can't figure out what else I'm missing. It could have something to do with the name of the file. It isn't really Icon?, but Icon^M (^M seems to be the character for carriage return). What were they thinking when they gave the file a name like that?
 
I'm not too sure about how samba works, but can't you do the standard trick of selecting the mounted folder/drive, Get Info on it, select another item with an icon you like, Get Info on that as well, select the icon in the Get Info panel of the other item, copy it, then select the icon in the samba Get Info panel, and paste?

It's tedious and not exactly what you want, but it'd at least provide different icons for each.
 
jsw said:
I'm not too sure about how samba works, but can't you do the standard trick of selecting the mounted folder/drive, Get Info on it, select another item with an icon you like, Get Info on that as well, select the icon in the Get Info panel of the other item, copy it, then select the icon in the samba Get Info panel, and paste?

It's tedious and not exactly what you want, but it'd at least provide different icons for each.
Click to expand...
Good idea. I was going to suggest that if it was a share with write access, but I forgot all about it while I researched the Icon? approach.
 
gekko513 said:
Good idea. I was going to suggest that if it was a share with write access, but I forgot all about it while I researched the Icon? approach.
Click to expand...
Does it actually affect the share at all, or is it just local? In other words, do you actually need write access? Just curious.
 
jsw said:
Does it actually affect the share at all, or is it just local? In other words, do you actually need write access? Just curious.
Click to expand...
I'm not sure. It doesn't work to change the icon for write protected dmgs the way you suggested. I tried that before I went the Icon? way. The icon info seems to be stored in files in the folder itself for normal folders, but there may be an alternative system in place for metadata concerning shares or write protected folders.
 
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