Automount share as non ROOT or SYSTEM user!

It seems to work fine here. I normally use MacFUSE but I was able to get AFP working too. The big difference is that SSH actually has more capability because Keychain provides ssh-agent. I can therefore login without hard-coding a password anywhere. That isn't as easy to do with AFP. It may be possible, but not easy.

Can you list what your config files look like?

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.

Okay I just had to reboot my MacMini system because of trying to get something else fixed and found that my mount point didn't come back up with user permissions (root only). So I did the following.

1. Removed entry from /etc/auto_afp
2. Restarted autofs (automount -vc)
3. Removed the mount point in /Volumes
4. Readded entry to /etc/auto_afp
5. Restart autofs
6. Checked Share and had access

My mount point is /Volumes/Media and when I removed if from autofs and restarted autofs the mount point was left behind with incorrect permissions. I removed it and DID NOT recreate it before restarting autofs again. This seemed to have fixed the permissions issues. However, this did not survive a test reboot of the system, so it looks like maybe when autofs is shutting down it doesn't remove the mount point?

Don't know.

I used these instructions to attempt the same thing. I got the same results described above: the share mounts, but only root can get into it. Instead of being owned by the user account and the "staff" group (which is what you get if you use Command-K in the Finder to mount a share), the automount directories are owned by root/wheel. Try to Chown the shares to yourself and nothing happens. No error, and no chown.

I called Apple for help and they said that anything involving command-line stuff is user-supported. :-(

I'll post back if I fingure anything out.

I have the exact same issue. Upgrade to Lion causes only root to be able to see mounts that were fine before. Very frustrating! I also tried changing ownership - to no avail. I would really like to know how to get this working again!

Rich

FYI -- I was just now able to "wake up" the mounts and have them be visible again by issuing an 'automount -vc' command in the shell as root. It took a minute or two for the folders to all become visible, but they are now accessible. I don't know how long it will last, since they seem to go to sleep after a while. Maybe it's a workaround until something more robust gets figured out...?

roblight wrote:

Bump. Having the same problem on 10.7.1. Please fix Apple.

Apple support doesn't read these threads. This is strictly user to user. Site operators step in, to manage posts, when asked by senior users.

hugoduraes wrote:

So, how can we warn Apple about this issue?

I'm not an expert on auto-mounting by any means. So if this is something to warn Apple about or is more of a make this nicer feature request, is left up to someone who is.

As always, to contact Apple: www.apple.com/feedback

I suggest starting your own thread to discuss whatever problem you are having. The original poster has one out of two machines misconfigured. We have not been able to reproduce any problem so there is not yet anything to report to Apple. If you explain your issue in more detail, we may be able to find out what is wrong.

Possible Fix that I found from different posts across the Internet.

I was originally mounting AFP shares from my NAS by putting the following line in my /etc/fstab file

(hostname):(share) (mount_point) url automounted,url==afp://(username):(password)@(hostname)/(share) (mount_point) 0 0

This was on an MacMini with 10.6, on my laptop with 10.7 I tried the same line and it gave me the permissions issue as abricko had. Now my MacMini is also giving me issues when it reboots. Researching the vast Internet I found the suggestion of creating a seperate auto_afp file for Autofs to use so here is what I did.

Create and set permissions

$ sudo touch /etc/auto_afp

$ sudo chmod 600 /etc/auto_afp

Open for editting

$ sudo vi /etc/auto_afp

Place the following style entry for your NAS

(local_mountpoint) -fstype=afp afp://(username):(password)@(hostname)/(share)

Make autofs aware of auto_afp

$ sudo vi /etc/auto_master

Add the following line

/- auto_afp -nosuid

Restart autofs

$ sudo automount -vc

This "seems" have worked for me. I completely unmounted everything, made these changes and the share appeared at my mount point and I could access it as my user (mountpoint permissions are 700 user:wheel).

Hope this helps someone.

Message was edited by: bmorgenthaler

etresoft wrote:

Nice post! Do you know how to remove the password from the file? I have a link to another thread that uses C code. It would be nice if Lion had something built-in.

Unfortunately I do not, mount_afp doesn't support a -o credetials=/some/file/some/where like mount_cifs does so you can't put that into the auto_afp file.

That best protection for this setup is the chmod 600 on the file so only your admins can read it. Unfortunately if everyone is an admin, eh not so good.

Thanks for the tips, I've tried all of these before, and just tried it again, still, they end up mounted as root.

The mountpoint's folder perms show as (no matter what I do before or after mounting):

dr-xr-xr-x 2 root wheel 1 Dec 2 21:51 files-3

When I simply type "mount", that mount shows as:

map auto_afp on /Volumes/NAS/files-3 (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)

Where other shares that I mount using "mount_afp" will add to this to the end of the ( ) area: "mounted by user"

I've tried changing the mount point to my a folder inside my home folder, it's stll mounted as root and chowned to root. I've tried chowning the auto_afp and auto_master to user:wheel, nothing seems to change it.

I'm bummed, becuase CLEARLY something changed in Lion, this ALL worked PERFECTLY and it was awesome to have on demand mounts (specially for the laptop when I would leave the NAS at home and come back)

Unfortunatley I've had to resort to a stupid script that I will run that runs mount_afp commands which properly mounts the share as my user, I've also added some options to make it more "sticky" (ie it takes longer to time out) but again, it's FAR from perfect like autofs was.

I've been having this problem as well on Lion. Snow Leo worked fine, exact same configuration. Even if I remove the mountpoints, they get re-created properly, however, they are mounted with root permissions. It's really bizzare. I expect Apple did something in the name of security, that broke the only use case I can see for the autofs daemon......

I wonder if we can replace it with a compiled from source version from BSD or something.....

Damnit Apple. NFS works till you try to use it, then you get disconnect errors. The only conclusion I have at this point is that autofs is totally broken in Lion and is useless. On the box I really need this functionality I'll probably have to revert to snow leopard as it worked perfectly there and the changes is Lion don't matter to me on that machine. Drives mounted directly via cmd-K work fine, so it has to be autofs, not the network/sharing stack or the server side.

Hacks like using login items are not sufficient for everyone. The biggest problem is that they don't auto-reconnect if the server reboots or the network disconnects etc.. IMO this is a really basic function of any Unix based OS these days and having it so broken is a huge failure in QA. If they don't want to support the normal autofs daemon, then they should completely remove it and move the functionality to the GUI. In this day and age of pervasive home networks, there is no excuse for not having the equivalant of the stupid automount checkbox that Windows has had since Win95. Ideally, they would fix autofs and provide a simple UI for it like that checkbox in Windows when mounting a drive.

Actually I'm having the opposite problem. My MBP /w Lion automounts just fine with userlevel permissions when I put an entry into /etc/auto_afp. It is my Mac Mini /w SL that is the one that is borked and doesn't function properly after a reboot of itself or a network disconnect from the server.