Show mounted volumes in the Sidebar (not servers)?

mount the sharepoints then individually drag them over to devices from the server view in shared.

I don't know of any way to do what you want short of temporary, manual means. The "Shared" section of the sidebar has no equivalent in Tiger -- as you have noted, it is purposed only to show currently shared servers & computers that advertise shared services via Bonjour, but not individual share points on them.

There is some logic to this: you connect to computers, not directly to share points, & the "Shared" sidebar section, together with Keychain, facilitates this & makes clear that the connection is to a particular computer. In the general case, server availability is transitory, so a persistently displayed shortcut to a share point that may or may not be available would be pretty confusing to most users.

An elegant solution to this might be a hierarchal "Shared" sidebar section, with the available share points indented under the server, possibly with a disclosure triangle similar to Finder folder list views, but obviously this is a feature lacking in the current design.

Also note that a share point is not the same as a volume to the OS. Not only may it represent a folder on a remote volume rather than that entire volume, it is an alias that appears in /Volumes/ (& thus in the top level local computer view) only after it is successfully accessed by the user, typically by opening it in the Finder. Until this happens, it is not considered a mounted volume by the OS & won't appear anywhere other than in the Network "neighborhood" or in the Finder view of the "Shared" computer's share points.

In this respect, Leopard is no different from Tiger: some action initiated by the user or a user agent is required to mount the share point as a volume. If not for this, it might be possible to do something with an AppleScript applied as a folder action to /Volumes/, but I don't think this is a promising approach for various reasons I won't go into here.

Without knowing why you need to access the share points directly from the sidebar, I have no way of knowing what workarounds might be suitable, but you might consider creating a folder of aliases to the mounted share points, & putting this in the sidebar. It is still not direct access, but at least it would be persistent & would allow you to group as many share points as you want from multiple servers in one Finder view.

I'm not quite sure what your complaint is. You still have the same option to manually connect via the "Go" menu as with Tiger, do you not? Does this not still result in mounted volumes appearing in the devices list? (BTW, "devices" is the appropriate generic name for them in a UNIX environment -- don't blame Apple for that, it is just following a naming convention older & more established than those of either the Mac or Windows OS's.)

If people are confused by the "Shared" section of the sidebar, which is a convenience item not essential to creating sharing connections, why not just suggest they remove it? A set of Finder preferences exists for this purpose. Deselect all three & no "Sharing" sidebar section will appear. Apple is not forcing anyone to use or see it unless they want to.

Moreover, Apple is not the originator of SMB, which has its origins in DOS, was modified by Microsoft in ways to this day not completely documented in any open standards, & must be reverse engineered for interoperability with other OS implementations. Not surprisingly, it must be configured carefully on the server side with this in mind for it to work reliably, which is no easy task since (among other things) its performance, ease-of-use, & security can't all be maximized at the same time. This is hard enough in a pure Windows Server domain environment, much more difficult in a mixed platform one.

Because of this, it may be premature to blame all the connection anomalies on Leopard and/or Finder's sidebar. A review of the protocols & settings used in your shop's SMB servers' implementation may turn up something helpful here, but that is probably best done by a network specialist familiar with the issues involved.

As a side note (& by way of an example), SMB incorporates "auto-discovery" too, just in a more limited way compared to Bonjour. Typically, to maintain network security, it is configured to auto-discover only on a client's initial contact with the server, & there are sometimes reliability issues with this mechanism on large networks due to latency, which may explain some of the problems your users are having.

So, don't be too quick to blame all this on Leopard alone -- as with all network issues, one must look at the entire network to identify causes & their remedies.

R C-R wrote:
So, don't be too quick to blame all this on Leopard alone -- as with all network issues, one must look at the entire network to identify causes & their remedies.

Please read questions thoroughly prior to posting a pat unhelpful, "Apple is great, the problem is you" answer, Leopard is the only difference in his network. Users can do what they want with Tiger but are disallowed that freedom in Leopard. This is not a network issue, it's an operating system issue. Just because you don't see the advantages of being able to mount discrete network shares directly doesn't negate those advantages for other people.

I'm sorry to the original poster that I don't have an answer for you either, I wish I did, as this functionality is sorely missed in my company as well. I normally wouldn't post a non-answer but the idea that just cause Apple didn't make SMB therefore you can't expect them to keep a previously existing and incredibly useful networking features is just stupid.

Daniel, I'm not sure yet, but you might investigate macFUSE as a resource to help you with your problem... http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

Daniel,

The single most important thing I'm trying to get at is that +share points are not volumes+. Share points are abstractions that facilitate sharing data stores that don't necessarily have the same data structures or other characteristics. Thus, while we might refer to (for instance) a 'SMB volume' for convenience, this is not accurate outside of a narrow context, since what is shared does not necessarily have all (or any) of the characteristics of a platform dependent data structure like a volume.

This distinction is not just nitpicking or some attempt to imply that Apple is right & everybody else is wrong. It is just that we can't ignore the fact that OS X supports a broad range of sharing protocols & discovery mechanisms or that its nomenclature & UI representations must be suitable for all of them, including those that aren't really mounted volumes.

We can quibble over details like where a shared data store should appear in the Leopard sidebar representation or how it should be labeled (& I agree this could stand some improvement), but I think we must start with a more precise, comprehensive description of the mechanisms involved & the limitations they impose if we are to get anywhere, particularly regarding maintainable hacks suitable for some specific environment such as yours.

Sharepoints aren't volumes? Maybe in the strictest definition of "volume". However, as you point out over and over, sharepoints are an abstraction; they represent an illusion. And what illusion do they represent? A volume. A virtual device. A mounted volume.

Ergo, it makes sense that a mounted sharepoint would appear somewhere in the sidebar, most likely under "DEVICES".

As you point out, "OS X supports a broad range of sharing protocols and discovery mechanisms", so in light of that, it is folly to apply strict tunnel-vision like Apple-World-Only definitions. The fact that something shows up on the desktop, but not in the sidebar is confusing and ridiculous--and hopefully an oversight on the part of those who reworked the Finder.

We have a similar problem here at work. We cannot mount our servers to the finder sidebar. Also if i want to open a file from the mounted server within an application like Photoshop its a nightmare.

With Tiger you just select the mounted server from the open box and choose the file. But now with Leopard you select the server and get a connection error message.
To work around this the staff have to drag the file from the server to their desktop and then open it from there, work on it. Save it, then return it back to th e server.

In pro mounted shares in the sidebar support I am a home user, yes, that's right, I use my Macs at home. Since the launch of Leopard I have been looking for a way to show mounted shares in the sidebar, I don't care one iota which drop down they appear in, just that I can click on them in the sidebar which to a certain extent did exist in Tiger. When I had a mounted share in Tiger it would appear in a bar on the side (I am half German and a "bar on the side" sounds much more 'German' as 'sidebar'). I really wish you lot would stop arguing about who is right and who is wrong in this situation. This "problem" would be solved by adding a checkbox to the finder preferences. It would not kill Apple to do this and it would not kill customers who don't choose to enable the functionality. I assume Apple read these posts from time to time and it would be nice if they could just tell us if it has been acknowledged and considered!

Alx

cleeland wrote:
However, as you point out over and over, sharepoints are an abstraction; they represent an illusion. And what illusion do they represent? A volume. A virtual device. A mounted volume.

No. A share point often represents a volume or volume-like data store that is not currently mounted but has the potential to be, depending on (among other things) the access control privileges negotiated between server & client. It should be obvious that this negotiation is dependent on services resident both on the server & client, their configuration, & how well they interoperate. If this negotiation isn't successful, it doesn't matter where or if the share point shows up -- without access, it is just a portal you can see but not open.

For example, Samba (which is not an Apple product) provides client-side protocols to implement interoperability between Windows server products & other OS's. Microsoft hasn't exactly made this easy: as the Windows server model abstraction increasingly incorporated layers of protocols on top of SMB/CIFS, MS became increasingly less willing to share the details of what it viewed as proprietary technology. In fact, it has been less than a month since MS agreed to provide Samba's developers with the needed documentation ( http://news.samba.org/announcements/pfif/).

Hopefully, this will (almost literally) open the door for better support of Windows shares on other platforms, including but not limited to OS X, but it won't happen overnight.

Anyway, the point here is that this is not just some 'Apple only' viewpoint. All modern share point concepts are of necessity abstracted into protocol layers, whatever the platform, & getting them to interoperate successfully is not something you can reasonably expect any one vendor to accomplish on its own.

Forgive me if I'm totally missing the details on this one. We also have been trying to get a handle on the new sidebar and 'SHARED' section.

But I do see a sharepoint listed under the 'DEVICES' section when connected (with an eject icon next to it). We had dragged this to the Devices area on the sidebar. And this directory is actually a subdirectory under another sharepoint on a server. So it's a couple levels down. And when selected, we see the contents as in Tiger.

We also use a shortcut to that sharepoint in the Dock, so that we can connect by selecting it and choosing 'Show in Finder' (forcing it to mount).

I just tried ejecting the sharepoints that were mounted and restarted the system. As soon as I connected to the sharepoint, it showed up once again under Devices as before. So we just disabled the 'SHARED' section altogether.

Now if you mean not being able to have a shortcut to it in the 'PLACES' section, then I agree. We used to have a shortcut to directories, folders, and even sharepoints in the lower half of the Tiger sidebar that would connect if necessary. Can't figure out how to drag things to the 'PLACES' section.

You don't see +share points+ in the Devices section, you see things ("devices" in BSD parlance) that actually have successfully been mounted as though they were volumes. They may or may not actually be volumes in the Mac sense of a named partition on a drive formatted in some partition scheme the OS can access. They appear as volumes because some protocol supports accessing them as if they were.

Examples are AFP (Apple File Protocol), native to OS X & supported by Apple, & SMB/CIFS, supported by the Samba open source project for most non-Windows OS's & by Microsoft for Windows OS versions.

It may be helpful to open a Finder window to the "Computer" list view & note the "Kind" of each item it shows. Disclose "Network" (kind: "Neighborhood") you should see all the named servers available in the network neighborhood, & within them the available named share points (kind: "Sharepoint"). Servers may be of kind: "Mac Server" if they use AFP or some other kind if they share via a different protocol. These servers are what (optionally) appear in the "Shared" section of the sidebar and/or on the desktop.

Not all servers in the network neighborhood will appear in the "Network" list, the Shared section, or desktop (even if the option to display them in the latter two is enabled). Servers you have manually connected to should always appear in "Network" & optionally in the other places. Additionally, any server that responds to a so-called "zero configuration" query supported by both server & client should appear. Apple's native zero config technology is called "Bonjour." It is an open source technology supplied with OS X & available for other OS's, including Windows.

Zero configuration technology is not a connection or sharing method but a discovery protocol that allows devices to advertise their available services to the network & discover what services other devices offer. This could be printer sharing, file sharing, or something else. It is called zero configuration because you do not have to manually configure anything or even know in advance that the service exists to know how to connect to it. The technology handles all this -- all you have to do is request access & furnish any authentication the server requires to connect to it. Even this may be automated if supported by the client OS, for example by the Keychain in OS X.

The important thing to understand here is that both client & server must support all the protocols involved & must be configured properly or none of this will work as expected. A Windows server not running Bonjour will not respond to Bonjour queries, so you will have to connect manually, even if it supports SMB/CIFS sharing with other OS's using Samba. If the server is configured to withdraw authentication each time a client logs off the network (& they usually are for security reasons), & the client isn't configured to automatically supply it or the server doesn't automatically ask for it on login, then you will have to do this each time you log in.

There are many other possibilities, especially when sharing across different OS's that may implement slightly different protocols or proprietary ones that have to be reverse engineered to work reliably in a mixed platform environment. To deal with them, you really have to dig into the arcane details, like how a share point differs from a volume or what a device or shortcut actually represents, to get anywhere.

The Finder representation, especially the "Computer" view, is of some help with this, but by design it tries to hide the arcane details from the user so don't expect it to tell you everything you need to know. The OS provides other tools for advanced network configuration, & they vary depending on the OS version -- NetInfo Manager is out, Directory Services is in -- but they require expert knowledge to configure, including a fairly complete understanding of all the details of the particular network involved, its security requirements, & so on.

For this reason, I think we aren't going to get much more out of this thread, which has become sort of a generic dumping ground for users with diverse & ill-defined network needs.