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Auto mounting a network share in OS X

A

Aegelward

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 31, 2005
528
54
UK
hello there, i just got my first mac a few days ago. i'm extremely happy with it, except for one minor niggle to do with networking-

i can't see any way to automatically mount my NAS's shared drive, its a buffalo linkstation 2.0

can anyone shine any light on it?
 
Let us know if you know how, Le Big Mac.

I tried to write a shell script to mount a network drive. I got as far as mounting it, but I couldn't find out how to make Finder realize it and place it on the desktop...
This doesn't apply to the original poster, but there is also the question of if the drive is on the network at login... :confused:
 
Aegelward said:
hello there, i just got my first mac a few days ago. i'm extremely happy with it, except for one minor niggle to do with networking-

i can't see any way to automatically mount my NAS's shared drive, its a buffalo linkstation 2.0

can anyone shine any light on it?
Click to expand...

I use a Buffalo NAS too, and have the same issue (as a new switcher). The lack of "reconnect at login" is annoying, but adding the servers to your login items fixes this. What is more frustrating is the fact that the network drives are all dropped when the mac wakes up from sleep. The workaround I have found is this:

Mount the network drives that you want to keep persistantly. Create an alias for each drive. Copy to your home directory and login items. Then if a drive gets dropped you can use spotlight to find the alias to re-mount (or use quicksilver to really speed things up).

If anyone knows a better way to handle this please let us n00bs know! I'd love to have a hotkey combination that would just re-mount all of my network drives. Is this possible?
 
i used a simple solution

just mounted the drive once, made a link (by dragging the drive icon into an empty folder) and then draggint the link into the login items

works everytime
 
clunky

as a relative newbie to Macs, this network clunkiness does surprise me. And when I asked a long time mac friend of mine how to automate it, he gave me a "why on earth would you want to do that" stare..

I've created alias' for the network shares that I use and dropped them on my desktop. A simple double click on the alias icon and bingo, I'm there.

Of course, whats silly is that as soon as I've double clicked on the alias, then the drive icon is also put onto the desktop.

Ah, the joys and quirks (and clunkiness) of OS X
 
Greebazoid said:
as a relative newbie to Macs, this network clunkiness does surprise me. And when I asked a long time mac friend of mine how to automate it, he gave me a "why on earth would you want to do that" stare..

I've created alias' for the network shares that I use and dropped them on my desktop. A simple double click on the alias icon and bingo, I'm there.

Of course, whats silly is that as soon as I've double clicked on the alias, then the drive icon is also put onto the desktop.

Ah, the joys and quirks (and clunkiness) of OS X
Click to expand...

Sometimes I find the aliases stop working, even when I am connected to the network. I'll double click them and nothing happens. I have to trash them, log in to the server and create new aliases. This happens randomly, and is really annoying. So far as a new switcher this is my one big frustration with OS X. I use network shares a lot!
 
rockstarjoe said:
Sometimes I find the aliases stop working, even when I am connected to the network. I'll double click them and nothing happens. I have to trash them, log in to the server and create new aliases. This happens randomly, and is really annoying. So far as a new switcher this is my one big frustration with OS X. I use network shares a lot!
Click to expand...

They had this working in 10.3.0 but took it out in 10.3.3. Why? Because there was no way to disconnect from the server when you connected. Too many people complained and they put it back to the old way.
 
I store a lot of my documents on a server at home. Just added it to the login items on my MacBook Pro. Works a treat!!! Not sure what's going to happen when I take my MBP away from the network though...
 
This drives me nuts and means my wife won't bother using the mac as frontrow loses the programs stored on my network drives everytime the machine has been put to sleep.

Very annoying and should be fixed. If you specify that a network drive should be connected at login it should be connected after a sleep.
 
I just today purchased a Linkstation 300GB. How can this be so difficult? Everytime I put one of my computers to sleep it loses connection to my NAS and I have to reconnect to it with the alias and enter my passwords and so on. I can't trust this to do anything, since I'd like to use it as my primary media drive and to store all of my documents and EyeTV recordings.

Really, isn't there any third-party program for this?
 
My solution

I have a Buffalo NAS too, and as a new switcher this is my number one complaint about OS X. However, I have a workaround that should help some of you. First, create an Automater workflow that mounts these drives. Save it. Then save it again as an application and put it in your dock. Now you can click the little robot icon when you wake up from sleep and it will auto-reconnect all of your mounts. Also, if you uncheck "put drives to sleep when possible" in energy preference your network shares are a lot less likely to be dropped. Here's hoping they fix this in Leopard. :rolleyes:
 
automount works ok for nfs as far as i can see, but it just wont play with smb.

Every hit on google or here talks about 'login items' like its a solution to this problem. For me this isnt a solution at all, I dont log out i just close my macbook.

Also, automount is designed to mount on demand, not to mount all drives at boot or login then forget about them.

mount_smb seems to work ok, but automount cant seem to pass it the right parameters - I tried to debug this but the source for darwin automount depends on some non open source libraries, so you cant actually build it, so gave up.

This really surprised me as a relatively recent switcher I thought things were meant to 'just work' ;)

So, since nfs works, whats the best nfs server for windows?
 
I switched about 10 months ago, and now have two Macs. Overall, this is one of my biggest complaints about the OS. Being able to properly map a drive like I do in XP is very high on my wish list.

The other annoyances are being unable to maximize windows in to take up the full screen with the click of a button, not having a delete and backspace key, the difficulty of getting expose' to work with a non apple mouse.
 
in finder click apple then > recent items > recently mounted servers will be at the bottom of the list.

now if anyone knows how to change the server icon?

i have a LaCie and a nice icon for it but every time it's unmounted then remounted it goes back the the default purple icon. gahhh!
 
Sorry to revive this old thread, but this is one of my biggest complaints about OSX. This is my first Mac and I use network shares to my WinXP desktop all the time.

Whenever I wake from sleep, my system pops up with a box after a minute or so stating that network shares were disconnected, and I then have to unmount them.

Has anyone found a solution for this? If anything, is it possible to stop the window from popping up after waking from sleep?
 
An old thread, but I may be able to add something...

I switched about a month ago and as a windows user since 3.11, this issue of reconnecting network drives just seems madness to me - how could OSX sensibly be used in a business environment (where storing files locally is actively discouraged)...especially as this 'just works' in windows !!

Anyway, at the same time I bought mine, my mate bought his too and as he wanted to set up his first wireless network he bought an airport extreme with it . Now, I haven't had a chance to investigate his set-up but when I spoke to him a couple of days ago he didn't know what I was talking about and explained that there was an application in the "Utilities" folder called "Airport disk utility", which kept his drives persistent at all times. I had a play with this on MBP, but had no luck.

I'm a noob to OSX, but I couldn't get the Airport Disk Utility to see my network disks and from where I'm standing it looks as though Apple have built some proprietary stuff into the airport extreme to handle this.

Can someone explain what this application actually does 'cos it sounds like the answer if it could be configured to see network drives without having to buy an airport extreme.
 
Well, networking is one area where OS X is downright crappy compared to Windows XP (do not know about Vista). It is such a basic thing that it is a shame that Apple has not gotten it right. I would gladly trade all these useless Genie and Ripple effects for well-functioning networking.

Question for folks with Leopard previews: have they fixed networking?
 
nsbio said:
Question for folks with Leopard previews: have they fixed networking?
Click to expand...

God I hope. If its not fixed I will be very disappointed. Being a switcher since June, the networking aspect is my biggest gripe with Macs. Its pretty pathetic to say the least, especially the hangups if you do not unmount your network drivers before putting it to sleep.

Does anyone know someone that will automatically unmount all drives when I put my MBP to sleep? I have an applescript that will do this, but I don't want to have to manually run it every time.
 
1 Year Later...

I was poking around tonight looking for a solution to scheduling OSX tasks, and found what I would call the Holy Grail. (If you haven't already found it...)

I wanted to keep my drives persistent, but lose my network drives every time my Mac sleeps. I have an automator task to map all of the drives, so it's not difficult to remap them, but since my Itunes library is on one of those drives - each time I lose the mapping, I can't access my library.

Here's the fix (sort of...)
Using the automator task to map the drives
Download the app called Cronnix for the Mac (This is a cron scheduler, a really easy one, to schedule tasks in unix) http://www.abstracture.de/projects-en/cronnix
Open Cronnix and setup a new task to run the already designed automator action
Schedule the Cronnix task as often as you'd like (I set mine to run every day at midnight, but you could do it more often.
Note - running the script to map the drives has no ill impact if they're already mapped, so running this every hour wouldn't hurt a thing.

Happy scripting...!
 
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