Best way to permanently mount SMB shares

I would like to know the best way to mount an external SMB share (my NAS) on my MBP. I've seen various solutions to this, and they all usually revolve around adding login items that reference the share.

I think there should be an easier way that just purely mounts the share at boot regardless of anyone logging in.

Anyone know how?

MacBookPro5,3, Mac OS X (10.6.1)

Posted on Nov 4, 2009 4:20 PM

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7 replies

Nov 4, 2009 4:29 PM in response to robot1125

robot1125 wrote:
I would like to know the best way to mount an external SMB share (my NAS) on my MBP.


An external NAS should mount just like any other volume. Are there any admin tools that let you manage it directly?

Have you surfed the 'net for your specific device to see what other users are saying....lots of NAS wind up being not so OS X friendly AFAIK.

Nov 4, 2009 4:33 PM in response to robot1125

robot1125 wrote:
I would like to know the best way to mount an external SMB share (my NAS) on my MBP. I've seen various solutions to this, and they all usually revolve around adding login items that reference the share.

I think there should be an easier way that just purely mounts the share at boot regardless of anyone logging in.

easier? hardly. using login items is certainly the easiest. you can try using autofs or /etc/fstab as describe in this link.
http://rajeev.name/blog/2007/11/23/autofs-goodness-in-apples-leopard-105-part-ii /
not something i'm very familiar with personally. in particular I don't know how this will work with several users logged in at the same time.'

Anyone know how?

Nov 4, 2009 4:34 PM in response to robot1125

I can mount it just fine using the normal manual methods (Connect to Server... for example). The issue is that my backup software needs it to be mounted to work, and if I forget to mount it manually (after a reboot for example), the backups fail.

I'd prefer not to add it to my login items, since I now have to manage all accounts on my macs to do the same thing. I'd prefer to have it simply mount at boot time prior to any logins, like your local disks and other peripherals.

There must be a way.

Nov 4, 2009 4:39 PM in response to robot1125

I guess that would depend on the NAS. I'm using a ReadyNAS from Netgear and it just shows up in the Shared area in the left side of every finder window. Time Machine just uses it whenever it wants.

I'm allowing the NAS to use CIFS (SMB), AFP, and HTTP. Yesterday I got around to setting up the built-in Torrent client. Sweet. Next, the web server service...

In the ReadyNAS setup I told it to advertise itself by using Bonjour.

Some NAS drives are friendly with MacOS, others may need special login treatments.

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Best way to permanently mount SMB shares

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