Bigtime Problems With Volume Mounts
I'm been spinning my wheels on this for a week now and I'm totally stuck. I'm sufficiently desperate that I thought about offering a cash bounty via PayPal. (But I can't figure out an equitable way to do that so anyone who can help with this will win a virtual $1 "admin buck" and my undying gratitude.)
Here's what I'm trying to do: I have a Mac Mini running 10.6 server. I also have a 1T external USB hard drive. I want to permanently mount this external hard drive at /Users, so all user accounts will live on the external drive. I've been a sysadmin for 20 years, dabbling in Unix the whole time, and this seems to me like it should be a no-brainer.
Here's what I've tried: I added this line to /etc/fstab using vifs:
UUID=BDFE6D09-7483-3479-B37F-0BE15F9CBFBB /Users hfs rw
I've also tried a couple of variations, using different options (like LABEL and the volume label instead of the UUID, as well as explicit numeric values for fs_freq and fs_passno in the fifth and sixth fields. Regardless, when I run 'mount -av' I get:
GetMasterBlock: Error 2 opening UUID=BDFE6D09-7483-3479-B37F-0BE15F9CBFBB
GetMasterBlock: Error 2 opening UUID=BDFE6D09-7483-3479-B37F-0BE15F9CBFBB
mount_hfs: No such file or directory
mount: exec /System/Library/Filesystems/url.fs/Contents/Resources/mount_url for
/Network/Servers: No such file or directory
This is nonsense because the drive itself is formatted and partitioned and attached and on and visible in Disk Utility (though not mounted), and the /Users directory exists on the root. In fact, if I execute the following:
mount_hfs /dev/disk2s3 /Users
The volume mounts perfectly! Everything is peachy. Except, as soon as I log off twice, the volume unmounts for no explicable reason. Rebooting the system never automounts the volume like it's supposed to. Anytime automount (or mount, for that matter) fails, this is posted in the console error log:
10/9/09 6:38:59 PM com.apple.autofsd[91] automount: Mount for UUID=BDFE6D09-7483-3479-B37F-0BE15F9CBFBB has no path for the directory to mount
Oh, and yes, autodiskmount.plist is correct and exists in /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration.
So my questions are these:
1. Why does the darn think keep unmounting whenever someone logs off the server?
2. Why does mount -a fail, while mount_hfs works fine
3. What the heck am I supposed to do to get this thing to mount and stay mounted at /Users?
Thanks for taking the time to ever read this! 🙂
iMac, MacBook, Mac Mini, iPhone 3G, Mac OS X (10.6)