[geeks] iTunes and network filesystems

[Dave Kimmel]

On Tue, 11 Feb 2003, Andrew Weiss wrote:

> Actually this is proving to be a nightmare no matter how it's sliced... NFS
> doesn't quite work right, Netatalk doesn't support AFP 3 so long filenames
> can't be written (important for MP3's), and Samba is well... requires
> sharity to do an automount at login (which has to be done before iTunes and
> helper come up).  I don't feel like paying $59 for Sharity, so I'll have to
> either A. mount a subdir NFS using the -alldirs option, and then make only
> that area writeable by everyone, or B. script an smb cli mount.  I haven't
> decided which will be better... once that works ok, however, I will move the
> iTunes music library.

I haven't tried this, but...

What happens if you mount the Samba share in Finder, save the password
to your keychain, make an alias to the share, then point iTunes at the
alias?  Your samba server may need password encryption set up for this to
work without a password prompt.  Also go into Keychain Access and set it
to not prompt for allowing access to this.

I remember reading of a similar technique being used to make storing (most
of) your home directory in an encrypted disk image painless.  I think that
the main thing with the alias is that it carries around a bunch of
information that lets the system remount the volume properly.

-- Dave Kimmel
   crisco_kid at shaw.ca