Re: Reply to Answer to Mounted Network Drives
Re: Reply to Answer to Mounted Network Drives
- Subject: Re: Reply to Answer to Mounted Network Drives
- From: Chris Devers <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 6 Feb 2010 10:12:39 -0500
Right, I realize that. Depending on your preferences and on the way
you mount the volume, you may or may not immediately see a window for
it (or even want to see a window for it). And the mounted volume can
generally be found by browsing down from the server's icon under the
Shared section of the sidebar, or at the top of the hidden /Volumes
folder, if you know to look in those places. But not everyone does.
On Tiger & Panther, mounted drives automatically showed up in the
sidebar, but that functionality was removed in a fit of overzealous
decluttering in Leopard. You can bring back that functionality
manually by dragging the share's icon from the desktop or a Finder
window over to the Devices section at the top of the sidebar, just
like you can add it to the Dock. This mostly restores Tiger behavior:
when you unmount the drive, it disappears from the sidebar, and when
you remount it, it comes back. This restores quick, "no digging"
access to the drive when you're trying to open or save a file in any
application that uses that open/save dialog, which is almost
everything.
I know how to find it. You know how to find it. But a lot of my
company's customers are Mac novices, and don't realize that these
network drives are mounted if they can't see them right there, so I'm
trying to come up with a way to make their lives easier.
--
Chris Devers
On Sat, Feb 6, 2010 at 7:44 AM, Richard Lake
<email@hidden> wrote:
> Hi Chris,
> RE: Mounted Network Drives
> I guess I really don't understand your dilemma. I have used Leopard for
> many years now and when I mount a network drive/path it appears
> automatically every time directly in the Finder window under 'Shared' and is
> available to all applications.
> And good luck with the other issue. :)
> Rikki
> On 6 Feb 2010, at 03:14, Chris Devers wrote:
>
> Thanks, but... what you wrote really doesn't have anything at all to do with
> my question. :-)
> You've described a couple of ways to mount SMB or AFP volumes. I already
> have that part of the problem covered. In spades :-)
> In fact, what I'm working on is a helper program to go along with client
> software for managing SMB/AFP mounts from my company's file servers.
> A lot of our customers preferred the way that Tiger & earlier put mounted
> drives on the Finder sidebar -- because then you have quick access to the
> network drive in Open & Save dialog windows in most applications -- but with
> Leopard & Snow Leopard, the only way to put them there is to drag the icons
> to the sidebar manually, and every user has to do this for every network
> volume. It gets tedious fast.
> The other change is similar. In some cases, having icon previews turned on
> can trigger a kernel panic on Leopard machines, so we have people turn them
> off manually. Having a tool to do that automatically would save a lot of
> time for a lot of our customers.
> So what I need to a way to assert these specific Finder preferences on a
> bunch of Macs. In some cases, the `defaults` command line tool is a simple
> way to do this, but in the cases I'm focusing on now, the `defaults` command
> doesn't work well, if at all.
>
> I can't do this in AppleScript Editor, because it can't seem to "see" the
> preference window as it changes. I can sort of do this in Automator, but I
> can only get it to flip the checkbox back & forth every time the tool runs,
> so it'll only have the desired effect if it runs an odd number of times, and
> the person never ever changes these preferences themselves.
> I think I may end up having to wrap each Automator workflow in a couple of
> blobs of Bourne or Perl code: the first to make a backup of the .plist file,
> then the second to make another backup and run a `diff` on them. From there,
> I can try to figure out if the line got set the way it needs to be, and if
> so, leave the updated version in place, or otherwise, restore the original
> version.
> The problem there would be if the Finder were lazy about writing the setting
> back to the file, in which case the second script might not notice the
> change. If that ends up happening, this approach gets a lot harder &
> flakier, but I still can't think of any other better way to do it.
> Any better suggestions (or resources) would be appreciated.
> --
> Chris Devers
>
> On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 4:58 AM, Richard @ Beaver Promotions
> <email@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> Hi Chris,
>> I tend to use Applescript over Automator these days.
>> Open Script editor from Applications and paste the following code in the
>> window.
>> Suggestion no.1:
>> tell application "Finder"
>> try
>> mount volume "smb://username:windowspassword/SharedFolder" -- Reach MS
>> Windows Network Shared Folder
>> mount volume "smb://ormachinename:windowspassword/SharedFolder" -- Reach
>> MS Windows Network Shared Folder
>> mount
>> volume "afp://username:macpassword@usermachine?.local/SharedFolder" -- Reach
>> Mac Shared Folder
>> end try
>> end tell
>> Configure the above as necessary.
>> Save this somewhere. Then click Save as; click save as Application,
>> uncheck Start Screen and check Run Only, press save button.
>> Now open System Preferences, click Accounts, click Login Items, go to the
>> location where you saved the Run Only file and drag this into the Logins
>> Items.
>> Finally check the Hide option.
>> Now whenever you start your machine these volumes will automatically mount
>> if available.
>> Of course you can run the script at particular times or whatever via iCal
>> as necessary.
>> Suggestion no.2:
>> Similar to above, but keep the volume paths stored in a config text file,
>> mount this volume and read it line by line mounting the volumes.
>> Less administration. When people change their machine name, shared
>> folders or password you just have to change this one config file from one
>> host machine.
>> Hope this helps, if you need help with suggestion no.2 google 'applescript
>> readfile' for the read file routine.
>> I learnt everything I know from using google with keywords 'applescript
>> <what i want to know>' ... lol works for me ;-)
>> ----
>> Rikki
>> On 4 Feb 2010, at 20:01, email@hidden wrote:
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 13:56:58 -0500
>> From: Chris Devers <email@hidden>
>> Subject: Using Automator to assert Finder preferences?
>> To: email@hidden
>>
>> I've looked through the archives, but don't see anything along these
>> lines. If this is FAQ material or has already been discussed
>> elsewhere, please let me know.
>>
>> I'm trying to come up with an automated way to make two changes to user's
>> Macs:
>>
>> * turn off icon previews for the Desktop and all 4 Finder display views
>> * add mounted network drives to the Finder sidebar, the way Tiger &
>> Panther did
>>
>> Both of these are, of course, simple to do from the GUI. For the
>> former, just hit cmd+J to bring up view options, then uncheck the
>> boxes as needed; for the latter, just drag the drive icons to the
>> sidebar.
>>
>> The problem is that I'm having trouble coming up with a good automated
>> way to do this for masses of computers. I could just distribute a
>> common .plist file for people, but I don't want to clobber any of
>> their other settings, just these two, so that's overkill.
>>
>> For other things, I can use a `defaults write ...` command to change
>> the option, but because of the way these are both set within nested
>> data structures in the .plist file, the syntax for that starts getting
>> complicated and, worse, brittle. I could also use PlistBuddy, which is
>> a bit more adept at handling complex .plist structures, but it still
>> seems like a pain for this problem.
>>
>> Then I realized that Automator can record me making these changes, and
>> save the result as a runnable application that appears to work, at
>> least for the icon previews problem -- haven't tried it for the
>> volumes-in-sidebar one yet.
>>
>> The downside though is that every time you run it, it just toggles the
>> state from whatever it was last set to, rather than affirmatively
>> asserting that the box needs to be unchecked only if it was previously
>> checked, and I can't seem to figure out how to insert that kind of
>> logic into the Automator workflow. (Maybe I could call a shell script
>> that does a diff on "before" and "after" versions of the .plist, and
>> reverts back to the original if it was already set properly?)
>>
>> I also tried AppleScript Editor, but this doesn't even record the UI
>> actions in enough detail, just "open Finder, open window, close
>> window". No help there.
>>
>> So, The Question:
>>
>> What is the usual method, if any, for using Automator (or AppleScript)
>> to change a preference file setting if & only if it wasn't already the
>> way you need it to be set?
>>
>> Thank you.
>>
>>
>> --
>> Chris Devers
>
>
>
--
--
Chris Devers
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