Brightrev

Macs are increasing in popularity, and I think that will eventually lead to more Macs running on Windows-based business networks. Running Mac OS X clients with Windows server creates interoperability challenges that I'll address in a series of articles. In this article, I show how to automatically mount a Windows share in Mac OS X Tiger.

Windows has the built-in ability to map network drives, connecting desktop PCs to departmental and personal shares on file servers. If you're integrating Macs into your Windows environment, you may want to use similar functionality to setup home directories for your Mac users, or to allow Mac and PC users to share the same set of files.

To automatically mount a network drive on the Mac, you first need to connect to it. Open a Finder window, and then click Go -> Connect to Server...

In the Connect to server... dialog, type:

smb://servername

The name of my server is Enterprise, so I type smb://enterprise.

You'll be asked to authenticate with your username, domain and password, and you can choose to save the authentication information to your Mac's keychain for later use. If you see an error at the authentication stage, see my note at the bottom of the article.

Once you've authenticated, you'll be presented with a list of shares on that server. I'd like to connect to my Pictures share, so I select it from the list and click OK.

You've successfully mounted the share!

Mac OS X will create an icon on your desktop for the drive you mounted. To mount the drive when you login, you need to drag it to your user account's Login Items. To do this, go to System Preferences, then Accounts and click your account in the list.

Click the Login items tab and then drag the drive icon from your Mac's desktop to your login items. You can also click the + button and select the mounted drive in the Finder window that pops up.

The next time you logon to Mac OS X, your network drive will mount automatically.

Note: If your file server is also an Active Directory Domain Controller, you'll need to change (or ask your administrator to change) the Digitally sign communications (always) setting, as described here. This potentially opens your Domain Controllers to a specific (and rare) type of attack, especially if your physical network is insecure. Please make sure to study the security implications of this change before making it.

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