Best Way To Keep A Drive Always Mounted

[Neil Laubenthal]

Quoting Michael Stearne <mstearne at entermix.com>:

> We need to have a drive on one mac to always be mounted on another mac
> (both 10.4) within the same local network.
>
> The most important thing is to make sure this drive is always mounted
> and comes back up after reboot of either machine.

As noted in other replies . . . fstab doesn't always work reliably  
(even under Tiger) and I too saw some netflack about it being ignored  
in Leopard but don't really know.

Putting the alias in Login Items works but only if the machine is  
logged in and requires putting in a password.

If you're not adverse to hard coding a password in a script . . .which  
if it's at home, protected by a firewall, only used by family, and  
doesn't have any national secrets on it . . . then I have a couple of  
scripts that work. One involves the mount volume command and one  
(which actually works more reliably but does pop a window for the  
volume open and then closed when it runs) uses the Open Location  
command. Either of these can be set to run at login or periodically by  
cron, iCal, or (my personal favorite as it doesn't clog up iCal's  
calendar) iMonTime. I can post the scripts if you like them.

There may be also some new way to do it in Leopard that we haven't  
figured out yet.

If it's for some sort of backup thing . . . then SuperDuper will do  
this as well . . .although the merits of cloning in general as a  
backup or how SD compares to Time Machine are beyond the scope of this  
particular discussion . . . and SD hardcodes the password somewhere in  
it's settings file anyway.

Personally . . .for a home file server or something similar . . . I  
don't have a major problem encoding the password in a script. I use a  
different password that is definitely not used elsewhere . . . and it  
won't work if away from anyway (although this may change with  
Leopard's BacktomyMac stuff). One could compile the script into a  
locked application so that it can't be easily opened with ScriptEditor  
. . .although it still might be vulnerable if somebody opened the  
bundle and dug through it.