Arghhhh! Apple has done it again. They’ve changed the manner in which NFS shares are mounted. Back in 10.5 Leopard, the Directory Utility was used to mount shares. In 10.6 Snow Leopard the Disk Utility program is the place where this is done. That wouldn’t have been so bad except for the fact that the upgrade from 10.5 to 10.6 wiped out my NFS mount definitions. Which forced me to learn this new procedure:
Fire up Disk Utility and select File -> NFS Mounts… Doing so will lead to a very similar dialog as in the 10.5 Directory Utility. Here’s the list of mounts on my client:
You can click the “+” to add a new mount. In the following case, I clicked on the pencil to edit an existing mount:
I’ve been using the “-P” advanced option to access the shares on our QNAP NAS device. See Mac OS X mount_nfs man page for details.
Adding Shares to Finder
The trick to adding a convenient folder to Finder’s Places folder is to ensure that you create a directory containing the mount points. For example, I defined my mount points under /Volumes/network/.
But you might not see /Volumes and your containment directory when you look at the hard disk in Finder. Use “command-shift-G” to bring up a dialog such that you can go directly to the directory of interest. In my case I went to /Volumes and simply dragged the “network” containment folder over to the Places folder. Voila! Now whenever I want to access my NFS shares, I simple click on the “network” folder in Finder. This is how I had it arranged in 10.5 as well.
As in 10.5, the shares will automatically be mounted as you start your system. The day-to-day experience with this approach was pretty good. Even when our MacBook Pro wasn’t attached to our home network, the machine does not experience any noticeable hangs or hiccups because of the unavailability of the NAS server.
