My Mac Won't Keep It's Network Connections...

L

lundbergaj

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I have a G4 iMac as well as a Linux samba server and windows XP machines. I'd like to keep my shared network drives (on my Linux server and on one Xp machine) mounted on my mac. I can easily use control-K and mount the drives when i want to, but my mac seems to drop these connections whenever the screensaver kicks in (and requires a password to unlock the screen). I typically get the message "A server you are using is no longer available. Do you want to continue trying to contact it?"

Having the mac try to continue never seems to work, but reconnecting to the server always works perfectly. So, while I'm having no trouble mounting drives, I want to be able to keep these shared areas mounted. I'm behind my own home firewall, and don't use any passwords on these particular shares. I'd just like some help making these mounted drives persistent.

Andrew
 
As far as I know (which extends up to Mac OS X Panther), Mac OS X won't keep the connections. However, you can make aliases (aka "shortcuts") by dragging the already connected shares to the Dock. Then all you would have to do is click on the Dock's network share icon and you'll be prompted for login info.

As for Tiger, I'm not quite sure if this has been addressed, but if not then this surely is an option.

It is possible that the Mac is going to "sleep mode." I usually disable this on a desktop machine of when a notebook is plugged in. Most machines usually shut off access to themselves from other machines and vice versa when in sleep mode to conserve energy, hence the disconnections from the network. Once it wakes up though, it does become an active member of whatever network, but you would have to remount the shares. If you don't care about your desktops going into sleep mode, then head over to System Preferences-->Energy Saver and disable it when plugged in (set it to Never).
 
I can turn off the sleep mode, and that will probably work okay. It does seem odd that the shares aren't automounted, but I gather I could instead do this in the terminal if I wanted to (as one can automount network drives in Unix (or at least Linux) by setting up /etc/fstab appropriately.

Andrew Lundberg
 
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