Finder not showing mounted /Volumes devices?

S

smarr

Registered
I'm having a problem with the Finder (OSX 10.6.7) when using the terminal/shell to mount network drives.

-First: the reasons I'm doing it this was and not with a "drag and drop the device into the LoginItems/StartupItems--These mounts must be present for every user and the OSX systems are on a domain, so the user are not added manually and may not exist for some time--so the mounts must be performed automatically every time a new user logs in, even for the first time. There are also too many shares to allow to clutter up a desktop.

I have mounted external Linux server drives (shared with Samba on the linux box) with no problems using:

cd /Volumes
mkdir NewDeviceShare
chmod -a# 0 NewDeviceShare
chmod 777 NewDeviceShare
mount_smbfs -o nobrowse "//user:password@LinuxServerName/NewDevice" "/Volumes/NewDeviceShare"

This works well. Devices are mounted to /Volumes and appear in a terminal using the 'ls' command. The devices are also hidden from the desktop because of the 'nobrowse' argument. Using the finder to navigate to the /Volumes folder also shows the newly mounted drive as expected.

*However*, if the shared device is a Windows 7 device share (as opposed to a Linux device share), the device appears on the desktop, and shows in /Volumes with a terminal 'ls' command, but it does *not* appear in the finder when you navigate to the /Volumes folder.

Because we mount all our devices within the Volumes folder to avoid cluttering the desktop with many devices, this prohibits navigating to the shares.

Does anyone know what might be causing the Windows mount to not be visible in /Volumes when using the finder?
 
Remove the nobrowse argument and when it shows on the desktop use the Get Info item in the context menu, that should tell you were on the disk it is mounted to. Most mount commands also allow you to specify a mount point, you could specify the /Volumes folder that way as well. As far as why... If it were a Linux install I would have to assume it was fuse playing tricks on you.

You could also use ls -ah from terminal to make sure the OS is not marking it as hidden for some reason.
 
I already know where it is being mounted: /Volumes because I can see it from a terminal. Mount_SMBFS *is* mounting it as hidden (-nobrowse has no effect on this, only whether it shows on the desktop). Any attempts to "unhide" the mountpoint with setfile result in "lack of permission" errors, despite the fact that I have created the mountpoint and mounted it from the same terminal as the true administrator on the machine. This appears to be something in mount_smbfs that mounts linux smb shares as visible and windows shares as hidden. I have yet to find a way to make the share visible even though it is there and works--it is only hidden from the finder when you attempt to view it in /Volumes--the terminal can see it just fine in /Volumes.
 
Check the man pages for mount_smbfs, also while it probably isn't the issue, you may need to set up a computer as the browse-master for the workgroup. This is done by setting the right value in smb.conf to override the priority of other browse-masters. Any system on the network can be a browse-master and it is decided based on priority. By default the Mac OS X samba configuration defaults to lowest priority.

Check out this thread...
http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=12397549
 
I have gone through the mount_smbfs man pages and tried various options to no avail. We do already have a master browser for the workgroup/domain, all active domain controlled. The Macs should not need to be the browse master and the smb servers (which are for the linux boxes that *do* work) are performing fine. The macs are seen by the windows boxes via UNC filenames.

Wish I had some old windows NT or Vista boxes still around to test against the Windows 7, but we finally got rid of all of those. Something during the mounting process on the Mac side is identifying the served share as windows and OSX is flagging it as hidden in a manner that doesn't seem changable by the admin. Strange.
 
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