Networking with external HD

[Neskire]

I have 17 iMacs connected via Ethernet. One has a Maxtor 250GB HD connected via Firewire. This iMac is set up with one user called Admin, one called Student and one called Server. I have established a connection from all the other iMacs and created an alias so that the students can connect with the Maxtor drive. The problem is that often the alias or any other method does not work. I found that if I restart, then the connection can be made. I thought it might be that after the Maxtor's iMac goes to sleep that it somehow interferes with the network connection. I tried to just leave it on with only display sleep with no success.

I want to be able to leave the iMac with the auxiliary 250GB HD on all the time so not only students can access files they need for study, but so I can transfer files across the net from my office Mac.

Suggestions?

[trevor]

If the host computer goes to sleep, the drive will not be accessible. What do you mean by "I tried to just leave it on with only display sleep with no success."? What exactly does no success mean?

Trevor

[Neskire]

Display sleep means that only the screen goes blank, the computer and HD stay active. I still cannot access the external HD when logging in via the network...acts as if it had been in HD sleep mode.

When I try no sleep modes, I still have difficulty accessing the iMac from another via the Ethernet. It would appear that there is a time-out for either the iMac or the external HD that is interfering.

[hayne]

Let's call the Mac with firewire drive "Fred". You should enable "Remote Login" in the Sharing preferences of Fred. Let it go into "display sleep" and then try to login Fred from another Mac using the command
ssh -l Admin ip_address_of_Fred
in a Terminal window. Supply your Admin password when asked. Then execute the following commands:
cd /Volumes
ls -l
ls -l name_of_firewire_drive

[trevor]

Quote: Originally Posted by Neskire I thought it might be that after the Maxtor's iMac goes to sleep that it somehow interferes with the network connection.

Quote: Originally Posted by Trevor If the host computer goes to sleep, the drive will not be accessible.

Quote: Originally Posted by Neskire Display sleep means that only the screen goes blank, the computer and HD stay active. I still cannot access the external HD when logging in via the network...acts as if it had been in HD sleep mode.

I know what display sleep means. What I asked is what "no success" means to you? You haven't yet defined it. Do you get an error message, and if so exactly what does the message say? Do you get messages in your Console?

Quote: Originally Posted by Neskire When I try no sleep modes, I still have difficulty accessing the iMac from another via the Ethernet. It would appear that there is a time-out for either the iMac or the external HD that is interfering.

Again, could you please define the difficulty? What exactly do you see when this occurs?

Trevor

[Mr. Cheese]

There must be something unfinished in the operating system here or something that Apple wants users to go and shell out for OS X Server, Cuz I have seen this issue go unanswered in this forum in its varying permutations.

My question is, what steps are necessary to make a shared point on an external volume that is accesible when no user is logged in locally (to a mac os x box)? How do I tell the Apple File Sharing daemeon that my firewire drive exists and that it should automount or whatever and be checked for directories that might be shared for that particular user?

I am basically trying to recreate the Mac OS 9 model, where all you did was create a folder and set its owner to whoever you wanted to login to it (or group) and when they looked in the chooser, saw the computer listed, they could connect to said volume (and only the Volumes that user had permission to view showed up in the list). (so long as appletalk filesharing is enabled)

I have tried using a program called "SharePoints" that is supposed to do just that, but, woefully, once I log out, (the idle state I want to leave the computer in) the volumes are no longer accessible (IF they are external Firewire Drives). Prior to this however, everything works as I would expect it to. Users can connect remotely, and I can even make it so that only the shares that the user has permission to view are listed.

If, however, I log back in, they are now also not accessible. It is not until I reboot and log in that they (the user's shares) are again accessible.

Now what is unique about this set up is if I create a user through the normal procedure of going to system preferences, selecting user accounts, it works just fine, (i.e it creates a user folder in the "User" directory (on the boot volume, and users can login remotely whether I am logged in or no. (Also whether I log in and out and in again) but only to that directory (or any folder on that Physical Drive regardless of partition). If I change the users directory to an external drive (which does have retain permissions turned on) it ceases to list the share. If I set it back to /Users/<username or any folder in User directory (I haven't tested if its anywhere a secondary internal ATA drive/partition), it again lists it's share. And if I take one of my manually created users and assign their home/directory to /Users/<username> then they can connect to that folder that I have assigned in the Users.

So in short, It appears that Apple is updating/refreshing or has a link somewhere to the Boot Physical disk or to the only internal ATA drives to check for appletalk shares, but doesn’t know to check external volumes (or at least Volumes that utilize the Firewire technology - be interesting to hear from someone who has an external scsi drive/zip/usb/etc/ram disk/(anything other than the internal ATA drive)).... It does when you first login, but not in it's prelogin state or post login->logout->login state (as do users who have accounts in the users folder on the boot volume).

A hack type fix for this issue might be if there was a way to create a Symlink to the user's directory on the external drive and place it in the user's directory, so it was available when he logs in , but I am not sure how you do this. This is not ideal though, and it would be preferable that the user just logged in to the shared folder with their designated file permissions. Any thoughts anyone?

[hayne]

Quote: Originally Posted by Mr. Cheese what steps are necessary to make a shared point on an external volume that is accesible when no user is logged in locally (to a mac os x box)? How do I tell the Apple File Sharing daemeon that my firewire drive exists and that it should automount or whatever and be checked for directories that might be shared for that particular user?

I think what you need is a StartupItem (not a Login Item even though Apple confusingly labels these as Startup Items in the Accounts preference pane) that would mount your external disk. I believe there have been some articles on the main macosxhints site about how to do this.

[jeffo]

I have a set up almost identical to this. I have several computers at home and my dual g4 is my computer that i want to connect to for the 620gig of drives i have in that machine. I have my harddrives set to not go to sleep too, which you may or may not have set. this is a setting in the energy saver pane if you are not sure where to find it. The only things that i can think of that is different is two things:

1) all of my accounts are admin accounts and not normal user accounts, there are some normal users on my machines but they do not need access to those drives so i have not worried about that.

2) my harddrives are all internal and not external. The reason why i mention this and think that it might be of value is this: I have one 80 gig drive that i do some backups with. this drive kinda just floats around from computer to computer at times, but what i have noticed is that the machine that it is hooked up to has to have a user logged in for the drive to show up in the /Volumes directory if i log in through the command line. Not sure why and since this was not high on my list to find out why i have not done anything about it yet. I only do my backups once a month so this is the least of my issues to deal with.

in short, try to keep one person (like maybe the admin of the 'server' machine) logged in, but for a bit more security switch back to the login screen.

i hope it at least provides a temporary solution until you can get it worked out.

[Mr. Cheese]

Oh I love the forums, La-La-La-LAAAAAAA!!! (SPLAT!!! - The next OS X Upgrade will surely break this again, My conspiracy theory!) Actually it is thanks to reading the FAQ's at Sharepoints (the useful Mac OS X sharing software) that directed me there.
http://www.hornware.com/faq/index.ph...mostrecent=yes

Problem Described at length:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...31101194218967

Solution Provided in brief:
http://www.macosxhints.com/article.p...31103155828117
reposted here

## Begin of Quotation
A solution is to create a file at /Library -> Preferences -> SystemConfiguration -> autodiskmount.plist, with contents:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
***"http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key><true/>
</dict>
</plist>


## End of Quotation

The part in the article further down describes a simple procedure to create such a file, but it did not work as noted by another user there is a difference in the syntax.

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin true
generates...

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key>
<string>true</string>
</dict>
</plist>

Notice the "true" notation differences. Still would be cool to know what the correct command is to create this file so I could just cut and paste to the command line. I'll attach a file that I used just change the extension from .txt to .plist and place in appropriate directory and reboot. VIOLA!!! Life is grand. (I am curious to know, though, now that we have fargged with the system, what dangers we are now susceptible to? i.e. the only thing that makes sense would be apple's policy to have drives such as their vaunted iPod dismount so as to preserve the data and butress the illusion that mac's are better than PC's because they (the developers) think of what is the most likely scenario to occur when data is lost, of course when the user logs out to go and use his/her ipod.

The developer thinks, "Well HOT DA** let's just unmount that puppy and everything will be JIM DANDERINO!"

2 weeks later (the present) here we sit at this discussion.