10.5: Create Stacks from network shares
One thing that I really miss from Tiger is having a shortcut on my Desktop to my network shared volumes, so I don't have to open a Finder window, click on share, and then select the machine or AirPort Extreme entry, and then the volume I want to access. Leopard won't let you make an alias of a network shared volume, or create one by dragging it to your desktop. What I found out, however, is that you can drag a shared volume to the dock as a Stack folder, and there it is, a direct link to your shared volume. You have to drag it to the area next to the trash; it won't work in the applications zone of the dock. It also helps when the Shared option won't even appear, and you don't remember the direct link to get to the volume through finder's Go » Connect to Server option. This happens quite often with AirPort Extreme, and now I just have to click the shortcut on the dock...
published on Tuesday, the 27. November 2007, macosxhints
A caution on network-based aliases and the sidebar
Earlier today, while testing another 10.5 hint (not yet published), I ran into something that's quite disconcerting, and could potentially lead to some lost data, if not just a lot of confusion. In a nutshell, here's the problem, which I've verified in both 10.4 and 10.5: Say you've got Mac1 and Mac2, and you've connected to Mac2 from Mac1. There's a folder on Mac2 that you use regularly, so you make an alias to it in your Hot Stuff folder in Mac1's Documents folder. To make accessing it easier, you then do the obvious thing, and drag it into your sidebar. But you want to know that folder's on your remote Mac, so you control-click on it in the sidebar and choose the Rename option from the pop-up menu. You rename Projects to Projects - Mac2. When you do that, you've just renamed the actual Projects folder on Mac2 to Projects - Mac2! The entry in the sidebar is, basically, a direct connection to the remote folder, not a representation of the ...
published on Thursday, the 8. November 2007, macosxhints
Create a transparent local software update server
This is a way to transparently set up a server to cache software updates on your local network. This doesn't require any modifications (defaults write...) on clients -- it just works. And I didn't find any other similar solution on the internet; not even here! It does require Mac OS X Server, however. Here's how we did it:Build a Mac OS X Server and call it yoursus. We used a headless Mac mini to do the job.You must use external DNS servers on this server (so it won't check itself for updates).Add a record for your server on your internal DNS, so yoursus.yourdomain.com resolves to your SUS's IP.Start Software Update Server (SUS). It may take some time to cache all updates -- our /usr/share/swupd/html/ folder now has almost 9GB of files in it!Start Web Service, and add following redirect (Server Admin » Web » Sites » default » Edit » Aliases » ...
published on Wednesday, the 10. October 2007, macosxhints
10.4: Another fix for Windows 2003 share mounting
Many users have problems mounting shares from Windows 2003 Servers from OS X Tiger (10.4 - 10.4.10) clients. The following solution has been tested in our enterprise where we have W2K3 servers, physical as well as virtual, and some within a SAN. Problem: From the network view in OS X, we could browse to the servers, but when we tried to connect, we would get the Delete/Fix Alias error. When connecting from the Finder with Command-K (either with smb://servername, smb://ip.address, smb://servername.fqdn, cifs://servername, etc.), we would get the dreaded Error -36 and the Console would show: mount_smbfs: session setup failed (extended security lookup2): syserr = Socket is not connected mount_smbfs: could not login...
published on Monday, the 20. August 2007, macosxhints
Make sure iTunes mounts a networked music library
There are a lot of tips here regarding using iTunes and a networked music folder. The biggest issue is iTunes changing the library's path to a default (local) path every time it is started if you forgot to mount the networked music drive first. After trying a few tricks and scripts, I noticed something really simple: when you have an alias to a resource on a network drive and click it while the drive is not mounted, OS X starts to search simply mounts the drive. So all I had to do was: Go to /Applications and make an alias of iTunes. Drop the newly-created alias on the network drive. Copy the alias from the networked machine back to my dock. (Remove the original iTunes icon from the dock to avoid confusion!) That's it! No script needed. If the drive is mounted, it just opens iTunes. If it's not mounted but mountable, it mounts and then starts iTunes, which will find all its files. And if the drive is not mountable (e.g. turned off), you...
published on Monday, the 23. April 2007, macosxhints
Automount Windows Samba shares over Novell
There are many hints and Forum discussions about automounting Samba shares, but none seemed to work over our Novell network. Just doing Connect to Server or the equivalent "mount volume" are insufficient -- the share must be mounted to a defined mount point. The following AppleScript solved our problems: tell application "Finder" try make new folder at alias "Macintosh HD:Volumes:" with properties {name:"share"} end try end tell do shell script "mount_smbfs -I ip_address -W WORKGROUP -U userid //server_name/share /Volumes/share" try tell application "Finder" to quit end try delay 2 tell application "Finder" to activate Replace Macintosh HD, ip_address, WORKGROUP, server_name, userid, and share with the appropriate values. First, the script tries to...
published on Wednesday, the 4. April 2007, macosxhints
Speed up networked video_ts folders in Media Central
In Media Central, you can make alias links to video_ts folders on other drives, and play them back across the network. Unfortunately, making an alias from network driveMovie Title (this is the form the program uses -- the movie name as a top-level folder, and a video_ts folder underneath) slows the program to a crawl. To speed it up, make the Movie Title folder local instead of an alias, then make an alias inside this folder to network driveMovie Titlevideo_ts instead! It helps speed things up quite a bit. I have a more rambling description (with another tip about categorizing) on my blog. [robg adds: I haven't tested this one.]
published on Thursday, the 16. November 2006, macosxhints
10.4: Play network-stored videos in Front Row
It has been frustrating to me that Front Row only plays shared movies that are found in the iTunes library. I couldn't find anything that would work. After reading this hint, I thought I'd give it a try to see if it worked with networked volumes. Lo and behold, it does! First, it's necessary to mount a share and navigate to the folder that you want to show up in Front Row. Then just make an alias of that folder, drag it into your local Movies folder, and open Front Row. The shared folder should show up in the Movies playlist. You'll need a zippy network for it to work, but it does work!
published on Friday, the 10. November 2006, macosxhints
Create an alias to a top-level Samba folder
At our office, we have a mixed work environment of Windows and OS X machine. On Windows, you can mount network drives to common directories. For instance P: will take you to //network/pc05/projectsFolder. You can create an alias on OS X to a directory inside a mounted drive, such as this one... //network/pc05/projectsFolder/project1 ...but I haven't been able to create an alias to the shared folder itself (//network/pc05/projectsFolder). I have tried to go to the /Volumes directory after mounting the folder and creating an alias from the mounted directory, but this doesn't always work, I don't know why, but sometimes I lose write priveliges if using that alias. I just found out that if you create an alias to a directory, as in the project1 folder above, you can then use the Get Info (Command-I) command on the alias (with the network drive mounted). Click the Select new original button, and it w...
published on Friday, the 11. August 2006, macosxhints