Q: HOW TO Mount a Network Share using the Automount as non-root

Unfortunately, I don't have time to dig into this right now. I can tell you that OS X is designed to work with Active Directory. If you have a managed user, everything works the way it should. If you are trying to cobble together something on your own, then you are on your own. However, you can't label the difficulties you run into as "bugs" without extensive research.

If you can figure out all the parameters you need, you can use Directory Utility to do all the hard work for you. Lacking that, start with Apple's AutoFS documentation and employ lots of trial and error.

I would like to figure out better for myself how all of this works. I have a professional interest in it. I am a bit busy until April 15th. If you bump this thread on or after that time, I'll help you track it down.

I had the same issue as you, and solved it slightly neater using AppleScript. The script looks like this (from my memory):

tell application "Finder"

     mount volume "cifs://macmini@192.168.1.1/NAS"

end tell

I saved it as an application and set it to run as a login item for the users that needed it. Once you save the password to your keychain it works automatically on login/reboot without the issues of automount.

Does this AppleScript method ensure the mount is available after the computer wakes from sleep too?

That was the main reason I was looking into using automount as it guarantees the mount is always available when I want it, but hit the same problem as stated above in that the permissions aren't guaranteed to always be set correctly.

I found that if I created a symbolic link in a local directory and linked it to the mounted volume:

ls -s /Volumes/Resources/Share  ShareName

Then the mounted volumes owner changes from root to the logged in user.

Now, if you access the link 'ShareName' you can access as the logged in user.

ln -s  surely....

Ah, yes... ln -s   !!!

I added two flags to your process, and since then my setup has been working even after reboot.

In step 2 I added the nosuid flag, which probably isn't necessary since it seems to be a default flag for the maps anyway

/-                      auto_smb      -nosuid

In step 4 I added the noowners flag. I think this is the one who did the trick; not really sure why, though...

/Users/username/mount    -fstype=smbfs,noowners,soft     ://user:password@server/share

I've adapted these instructions to try and automount an afp share (changing -fstype to afp) and editing /etc/auto_afp instead of /etc/auto_smb

When I run automount -vc as standard user, I get the error

automount: Couldn't open /dev/autofs_control: Permission denied

If I run it under sudo, it claims to have updated my afp mount, but still it doesnt appear as mounted in Finder.

Has anyone got this working for afp?

I'm frustrated this whole process isnt just trivial, we've been using shares for 10 years now

OSX really annoys me lately :/

After a little more extensive testing it turns out that my solution was very intermittent. Thus, I had to resort to the bash script solution proposed by x0054. I have however implemented the script as a LaunchDaemon, which enables the script to be run as root without having to authorize, and then cd into each user's mount point through sudo -u so that the mapping gets mounted by the correct user.

The problem with implementing it as a LaunchDaemon, is that the script is called before the automounting is completed, and thus no map exists to get remounted. I solved that problem by modifying the script containing a while-statement in the beginning:

while ! mount | grep "map -fstab on /Network/Servers"
do
        sleep 2
done

if ! mount | grep "mount .* mounted by user"
then
        sudo umount /Users/user/mount
        sudo -u user cd /Users/user/mount
fi

The if-statement is to ensure that the map is not already correctly mounted by the appropriate user, so that we don't do any unnecessary unmounting. This is useful if you need to run the script at a later time to remount maps that have become corrupt.

I have to wait for the "/Network/Servers/" mapping to be completed, since I am on a machine without any local accounts, only network accounts. This means that the script is not able to run the cd command as my network user until the machine gets tied to the Open Directory Server.

If you are not on an Open Directory Client, I suppose you should exchange the first line in the script with this one:

while ! mount | grep "map auto_smb on /Users/user/mount"

In which the script only waits for your specific mount to be mapped.

To call the script as a LaunchDaemon, you have to create a plist in /Library/LaunchDaemons. Mine looks like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
          <key>Label</key>
          <string>com.organization.remount</string>
          <key>ProgramArguments</key>
          <array>
                    <string>/Users/user/bin/remount.sh</string>
          </array>
          <key>RunAtLoad</key>
          <true/>
</dict>
</plist>

The string com.organization.remount is also the name you will have to give the file, with the extension plist: "com.organization.remount.plist".

The string /Users/user/bin/remount.sh is the path to where you saved your script.

Finally I should add that the modifications proposed in my previous post seems superfluous. I have removed them, and everything still works.

So after a couple of hours trying to get this working, the one thing that kept messing things up was having the "soft" flag on whilst making changes. No matter if I umounted, autoupdated, restarted, or deleted directories, it seemed to cause the connection to stay alive with the bad settings.

Basically, whilst you're making changes / getting this working, remove the "soft" flag. Once your mounts work, add it back in!

I also tried many solutions from other forums, but it seems that none is working.  Only after unmount will make it work.

The less secure method of solving the permission issues is not to unmount and remount the drive but edit /etc/sudoers and add the active login to the sudoers list. This should allow you to use the automount -vc method without error.

Thank you very much callehedberg, your concept works well for me. But I'm not very familiar with scripting and having a few issues automating this...

1. my mount looks like this "Server.local:/music /Users/daniel/Shares/Music url automounted,url==afp://xxx:yyyy@Server.local/music 0 0

What should I put in line 1

1. while ! mount | grep "map -fstab on /Network/Servers"

I have tried while ! mount | grep "map auto_afp on /Users/daniel/Shares/Video" 

2. when I try to run this as "bash remount.sh" I get the following errors

bash remount.sh

remount.sh: line 1: while ! mount : command not found

remount.sh: line 1:  grep map auto_afp on /Users/daniel/Shares/Video  : No such file or directory

remount.sh: line 2: do  : command not found

remount.sh: line 3:  : command not found

remount.sh: line 4: done  : command not found

remount.sh: line 5:   : command not found

remount.sh: line 6: unexpected EOF while looking for matching `"'

remount.sh: line 27: syntax error: unexpected end of file

Is this not a bash script?

3. Can this be implemented using a login hook?

Mac OS X: Creating a login hook

sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /path/to/script

Thanks for your help, I've burned many hours on this automount task today.