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Level 1

0 points

Automount share as non ROOT or SYSTEM user!

The most annoying bug I've found yet!

I have two machines, an iMac and a Mac Book Pro.

The MBP was an upgrade from 10.6.8 to 10.7 the iMac was a full reinstall (erased the drive and booted off a flash installer I made for 10.7)

The MBP was previously configured (in 10.6x) to automount a few AFP shares from my local NAS. This had been working perfectly. After upgrading to lion, the entries in /etc/fstab were still there and the shares are still functioning fine.

I added the EXACT entries from the fstab file on the MBP to the fstab on the iMac. Now when the iMac boots the AFP shares are automounted by the system/root user and therefore are not accessible to any normal (admin) user on the iMac. No matter what I try I can't get it to automount those shares as a non system/root user. Clearly something changed with AFP configuration in Lion, yet the upgraded MBP still funcitons as it did before, so some new default automount / autofs setting has changed yet it wasn't touched in the upgrade. I'm wondering if anyone is aware of an AFP or Automount or autoFS setting I can try changing on the iMac to get this working?

To test things further, I changed the FSTYPE in fstab from afp to cifs just to test and it still mounts the shares as the root/system user. Yet if I use mount_afp or mount_smbfs it will obviously mount those shares as the user that is running the command, which is desirable. The only problem in doing this is if I disconnect from the network or the share drops it will not automatically reconnect and I'd have to run the command again.

iMac, Mac OS X (10.7), Extreme 2.8ghz 16GB RAM

Posted on Jul 28, 2011 10:26 PM

36 replies

x0054

Level 1

2 points

Mar 28, 2013 9:42 PM in response to x0054

Ok, after more research, here is the complete procedure I tride, and it works:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4927134

Reposted because I want to bump this to the top, to see if any one has better solution nowadays.

Aug 28, 2016 4:35 PM in response to abricko

The solution to this is to enable the Guest account in the NAS server with Read/Write permissions set for the volumes you try to share with AFP. If you use a personal home NAS this should not be a problem.

My NAS line in /etc/auto_master:

/automount/NAS auto_nas

and my /etc/auto_nas:

Netdisk -fstype=afp afp://192.168.1.1/Netdisk

# ls -als /automount/NAS/

total 2

2 dr-xr-xr-x 3 root wheel 2 Aug 29 02:26 .

0 drwxr-xr-x 3 root wheel 102 Aug 29 01:53 ..

0 drwxrwxrwx 1 root wheel 330 Aug 29 02:21 Netdisk

trismc

Level 1

4 points

Sep 25, 2016 1:58 AM in response to LefterisT

I can confirm this works and is stable, even on Sierra - but it's a pretty frustrating outcome that you have to drop to unsecured read/write "guest" access for any volume you wish to auto mount!

I wonder if this would work better if the NAS and Mac used the same user directory for permissions?

scotartt

Level 1

8 points

Sep 25, 2016 6:14 AM in response to LefterisT

No matter what I tried the autofs mounts would eventually be mounted as root. Possibly they are idling out and some root-user background process is trying to access them and this is causing the disks to be re-mounted as root.

Anyway inspired by another user's approach I wrote a small shell script with a plist file that runs it every 15 seconds to keep the disks mounted as the desired user.

See here - https://github.com/scotartt/shell_scripts

specifically : https://github.com/scotartt/shell_scripts/blob/master/fix_mounts.sh

and https://github.com/scotartt/shell_scripts/blob/master/org.autonomous.fixmounts.p list