Network Drives as Local Drives

[h'biki]

Here's a techy question.

I'd like to know if it is possible to 'fool' OS X into thinking that a network mounted drive is actually a local drive. Anyone know how? Can you do it with OS X Server? (ie have server drives 'seen' as local drives)

I believe you can do it with fibrechannel, but I don't want to spend that kind of cash - gigabit does well for the work we do.

Any help would be muchly, muchly appreciated.

Stu "h'biki" W.

 

[Baron58]

Here's a techy question.

I'd like to know if it is possible to 'fool' OS X into thinking that a network mounted drive is actually a local drive. Anyone know how? Can you do it with OS X Server? (ie have server drives 'seen' as local drives)

I believe you can do it with fibrechannel, but I don't want to spend that kind of cash - gigabit does well for the work we do.

Any help would be muchly, muchly appreciated.

Stu "h'biki" W.

You need to be more clear with what you're trying to accomplish, but in a sense, yes. I have all of my NFS shares (from Linux and Solaris servers) mounting automagically at boot time instead of being user-mounted. This allows network home directories since the 'home' volume is mounted prior to login. Directory Services gets the mount info from the LDAP server, and the LDAP server info is provided to Directory Services on the workstation by the DHCP server at boot-up time.

This is not something that you should try to set up on a whim, since you'll become very frustrated if you aren't willing to spend the time to learn and set up LDAP/DHCP/NFS as necessary. It took my sysadmin and I several weeks to get the procedure ironed out.

Volumes mounted in this manner will 'really' be at /private/automount/Network/volume_name, but will be symlinked automatically to appear as if they are in /Network/volume_name

 

[h'biki]

Volumes mounted in this manner will 'really' be at /private/automount/Network/volume_name, but will be symlinked automatically to appear as if they are in /Network/volume_name

Thanks for the info... but not quite what I wanted. I'll be more specific. We are moving to a workgroup oriented approach to our video and audio productions. We'd like to store all our ProTools audio sessions on a server (running gigabit) and haave users access them via the network. Normally for audio this would be a problem, but we're only doing two tracks of audio so its not a huge problem.

Basically, when you try to open a session on a network drive from within ProTools it stops you. Network drives can't be audio drives unless you're they're on an Avid Unity system (gigabit or fibre). Basically, its a way to encourage uses to purchase very expensive Unity systems rather than doing it themselves. Bollocks to that I say!

I've tried symlink but to no avail. ProTools knows the drives are network drives presumably via the OS, so I'm looking for something specifically which allows me to bypass such checking.