How to mount external drives on startup without login?

Question

I have a Mac Mini that runs as a server on my network. It has external FireWire drives attached, and I need them to be mounted at machine startup. By default they do not mount until a user interactively logs in.
There was a fix for this in Tiger, involving a NetInfo setting; but since NetInfo Manager and niutil are now gone, I don't know how to make this work. I can mount the drive manually by sshing into the Mini and using a diskutil mount command, but that is very cumbersome and doesn't make the drive available for startup activities that need to access it.
Tx!
KeS

Answer 1

Create the file
/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist
with the following contents:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key><true/>
</dict>
</plist>
You can do this with the following command (note: it will ask for your admin password):
sudo cat >/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount.plist <<"EOF"
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key><true/>
</dict>
</plist>
EOF