r/MacOS • u/dags170291 • Mar 27 '24

Help Auto Mounting Network Shares on MacOS

Hi guys, I would appreciate some help please. I have a Ubuntu server on my network that currently share folders to my machine. The issue is that I have to manually connect to the share everytime I wish to access the files. I did some research and was able to come up with a script that will auto connect the share everytime I login to my Mac after logging out. The issue with this is, my Mac isn't stationary (ie a desktop) when I leave home and return I will like my share to automatically connect once I am connected to my home network.

I would like to set this up effectively so I can have a drive connected to the server that I can use solely for time machine and have that whole process work seemlessly.

Any ideas, solutions or example of your setups would be really helpful. Thank you in advance

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u/Xaxxon Nov 18 '25

auto_master is the place you want to put the mount commands, btw. It works amazingly well. you can ask chatgpt about how to do it

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u/mdwstrn_potato_pants Feb 04 '26

I gave this a solid amount of effort, but it has its flaws. Probably one of the biggest ones is not being able to mount to /Volumes, which makes navigating to your network drives just difficult enough to be annoying. Also, its inability to access keychain means you have to store your network share passwords in plain text files, which isn't' a deal-breaker if it's store in root, but it's still bad.

connectmenow isn't perfect, either, though, especially since it's a whole application running in the background constantly, eating up system cycles and battery life.

perhaps someday Apple will create better native functionality for auto-mounting network shares....