This is a problem I've been struggling with for months. Hopefully someone here will have some useful suggestions.
My wife and I each have a PowerBook, and I have a file server, running linux, with several large hard drives in it. I've ripped all the CDs in my music collection and stored them on the file server. Since my wife has no patience for trying to understand how neworks function, I've tried everything I can think of to set up her PowerBook to access the shared music directory transparently, but have not been able to do so. I've tried, to no avail, to get her in the habit of connecting to the server before starting iTunes, and disconnecting when she's done.
I have configured the linux box to share the music directory over NFS, AFP (netatalk), and SMB (samba), and I can use the shared directory from her laptop via any of those protocols. I have tried using aliases in Starup Items, but she never logs out, so those don't get relaunched when she wakes up her machine, so the shares are gone after the first time she puts it to sleep.
I've also tried using NetInfo manager to set up dynamic mounts. This seems like it would be the correct way to do what I'm trying to accomplish, but each of the network protocols seems to have different problems when used this way. AFP never seems to survive her putting the machine to sleep. SMB will work for a while, but eventually won't connect. At first I thought it was simply a timeout issue, but I changed the server to allow unlimited connection times, but still it eventually can't connect. NFS very nearly works, and even seems to survive extended sleep seessions, but if the server is restarted the PowerBook won't reconnect. Since the server is pretty noisy, I have to shut it down at night, which means the NFS connection will only last one day. I can, in a terminal window, send a HUP to the automount daemon, and it will reconnect to the NFS server, but there's no way I'm going to get my wife to do that!
So, given all this detail, does anyone have any suggestions for me? From my experiments, I think that NFS is my best option, since it seems to require the least maintenance, has very low overhead, so performance is good, requires few resources on the server, and properly supports hard- and soft- links, which is a big advantage, IMHO. Are there any reasons I should choose to use SMB or AFP instead?
It seems like a possible solution to my problem would be to somehow automatically restart the automount daemon either each time the computer wakes up, or each time iTunes is launched. If there's no better option, can someone think of a way to do that?
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