Persistant mounts on OSX
At the day job I administer a classroom/newspaper newsroom with just over 30 macs. One of the recent complaints/problems I’ve had in there is with a network drive that disappears whilst students are working on a document - normally in QuarkXPress. We use a bespoke system for tracking work on stories and news pages that requires this drive to be present to work - it can even cause work to go missing a little more easily than it should.
I think the issue is that the drive is disconnected when machines go to sleep after 15 mins of inactivity. A student may work on a page for several hours, in which time they may be called for a news ‘conference’ with the sub-editors/lecturers, so this happens more often/with more justification than you might expect.
So here’s the challenge: what are the best ways to get a network drive to remain persistant, reconnecting when a machine restarts? A google brought up a few things I’d already been doing: dragging the drive to the user’s start up items to auto-mount at log in; a little applescript launcher for Quark that connected the drive before launching the program, that sort of thing.
Well, I don’t think I’ve cracked it quite yet, but here’s a start: I came across this thread, describing the behaviour I wanted as a ‘nuisance’. Turns out it was all about the screensaver on OS X. Apples do this rather nice thing with a folder of your pics where they zoom in on the pictures (I like it - really brings them to life) - they’ve got lots of default versions of their own, but you can also set it to a folder of your choice. If that folder happens to have an alias to a server, when the screensaver activates, it will remount that drive for you (assuming you have credentials in the keychain).
One hacked-together images folder later, and I think I have something working. I’m hoping that by setting a screensaver time that’s smaller than the sleep time on the macs it will remount the drive in the time between waking up and turning the screensaver off. Watch this space…