Saturday, March 10, 2007

Automatically Mount A Network Drive On Startup

As people start to purchase more and more computers, they often keep their old ones around the home and create home networks so that they can quickly access data or programs on their old systems. This is an approach for Mac OS X and the following is a quick way to use Automator to create a small application that mounts a network drive and then how to set it up so that it automatically runs each time you start your computer.

This article assumes that you know the location of the drive you'd like to mount on your network and and can find it by clicking on Finder and then Network.

CREATING THE MOUNTING APPLICATION IN AUTOMATOR

1. Open Automator for your applications and select Finder from your Library.
2. Select Get Specified Server and drag and drop it to the work area to the right.
3. Click the Plus Button under Get Specified Server
4. Under the "Show:" drop down menu select File Servers
5. Select the drive you'd like to mount
6. Click Connect - The Drive should now show up under Get Specified Servers
7. From the Action list drag and drop Connect to Servers to the work area to the right (This should be number 2 in the workflow)
8. Click Run to make sure everything is working correctly - The Drive should mount to your desktop.
9. Save the Automator script as an application in a location you can easily access it.
10. Go to System Preferences and click accounts - Select the Login Items Tab
11. Drag and drop the Automator application we've created to the area below "These items will open automatically when you login.
12. Restart your computer to make sure that everything is working correctly.

You can also use these steps to mount other types of servers on boot up.



2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Great work.

Anonymous said...

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? What is your best take in cost vs performance among those three? I need a good advice please... Thanks in advance!