Updated November 5, 2008:  Since several of our Macs are running Mac OS X 10.5 in which it is simple to set up access to NFS shares and a prior bug in the QNAP NAS server implementation of NFS and its QRAID-1 backup feature was fixed, we’ve switched to using NFS to access the NAS server. Therefore the information below is out of date.

Earlier this week we finally installed our new NAS server. We published a blog entry describing our initial set up experience. One of the next tasks was to get our Mac OS laptop configured to automatically mount the shares from the NAS server.

A key requirement for share access from our clients is that we don’t want to repeatedly execute commands to mount and access the shares. Ideally, once a folder of interest is accessed, the supporting share would be automatically mounted.

NetInfo Manager and Automounting

Based on a bit of research, we decided to try out the Mac OS NetInfo Manager utility to define our automatically mounted shares. (By the way, we’re using Mac OS 10.4.11, Tiger). As with most tasks on Unix-based systems, the configuration is pretty simple – once you’ve figured it out the first time.

You can find the NetInfo Manager utility under Applications -> Utilities. Here’s what the configuration for one of our three shares looks like:

The “name” setting uniquely identifies this mount point. It appears that this value is also used to name the folder under the Network->Servers->network-disk-> location in Finder when the “net” option is used (see below).

“vfstype” setting of “url” simply states that the share to automatically mount will be specified in a “url” option.

The “opts” setting includes the following options:

• url: the location of the share and the username and password with which to connect to the share. In our case, we added the hostname “network-disk” to the Mac’s /etc/host file. “documents” is the name of the share as defined on our NAS server.
• net: We believe this option tells the automounter to automatically represent the share under Network->Servers using the hostname and share name specified in the “name” setting.
• nosuid: not sure what this option does.

Resulting Experience

After making these changes, we restarted the laptop and logged in again. Then we went to the Finder and looked under the Network->Servers area and found the following:

The “documents” and “pictures” folders are accessing two custom shares of the same name that we defined during setup of our NAS server. The “music” folder is accessing the “Qmultimedia” share that is defined by default on the TS-109 NAS server.

We’ve configured iPhoto to maintain its iPhoto Library under the “pictures” share. We’re in the process of figuring out whether we can use iTunes to manage our music files under the “music” share while maintaining our customer folder layout of music files.

Symbolic Links

We’d like for the “documents”, “pictures” and “music” folders to show up in the left pane of the FileManager window.  We’ll have to see how we can establish symbolic links to make this happen.

NetInfo Manager Versus Login Items

We prefer the use of the NetInfo Manager over adding an entry to Login Items under each user’s Account settings in System Preferences because the automounter will only try to mount the shares when they are accessed. We’re also able to avoid any password prompts by including the NAS username and password on the NetInfo Manager entry.

Failed Attempt with NFS

Since we noticed a dramatic improvement in performance when using NFS vis a vis SMB from our Linux clients, we first tried to access the NAS shares via NFS on the Mac OS laptop. However, we ran into some problems trying to get NFS to work properly from the Mac. Based on looking at others’ experiences with the QNAP NAS servers and Mac clients using NFS, it appears that there might be an incompatibility between how the NAS server’s NFS port usage and the default approach used for NFS by Mac OS clients. We have some leads on trying out a “-P” option on the Mac OS client side, but we haven’t yet had time to mess around further with the NFS experiments. Since we’ve seen examples of setting up automounts to NFS shares in much the same way as our SMB example above and we’ve successfully used the automounter with SMB, we’ll probably try it out NFS again at a later date with the “-P” option.

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