Websites Service loading before External Hard Drive

Hi,

I recently upgrade our Mac Mini server from 10.6 to 10.8 and upgrade the Server App as well. We have a number of sites (used for beta testing) that are hosted on a couple of external hard drives connected to the Mac Mini. This setup worked perfectly in 10.6. We also work off of the external drives as well.

Since upgrading to 10.8 we're having an issue with the external drive loading properly. It appears OS X and the Server app are loading the Websites service before the external hard drive mounts. So Server app will not find the external hard drive path where a site should be and will manually create it at /Volumes/External HD/Site Root. Then the external hard drive will be mounted as /Volumes/External HD 1. This causes the sites to not load as well as making the actual hard drive inaccessible to users connecting over the local network. They see a drive with a couple of empty folders where websites would be and thats it.

I was able to fix it by wiping the Websites out and removing the extra directories and rebooting the machine. Then I recreated the websites and all worked fine for a while. Later on though the server had to be restarted and the issue reocurred.

Any idea how to fix this? Seems like it may be a bug with 10.8 or the 10.8 Server app.