Network drive and fast user switching OS 10.7

I have a shared network drive that I want all accounts on my Mac to be able to access. On my Mac I have a single admin account and several non-admin accounts. The problem is that once one account mounts the network drive when another user logs in (using fast user switching) the drive shows as being inaccessible (a folder icon with a "do not enter" icon on it) and must be unmounted and remounted. This is an issue because unmounting requires the admin password which is not known to all users.
Is there a way that I can make the mount available to all users on the machine without needing to remount for each user? Or is there a way that I can unmount without requiring the admin account?
Thanks

System Preferences -> Users & Groups, click Login Options, you'll see it then. You'll need to unlock that preference pane with the lock in the lower left corner of the window to change that setting.

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fettouhi wrote:
Since I upgraded my GNOME installation the fast-user-switch-applet keeps crashing on me everytime I run it. I can't figure out what is causing it.
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Very annoying to have to deal with, but at least the problem is gone.

Disable fast user switching

Am using Lion on an older Mac Book Pro and Fast User Switching seems to make the system very unresponsive.
Is there a way to disable FUS, other than via
Settings > Users & Groups > Login Options > Show Fast User Switching Menu ... ?
There doesn't seem to be a control for this anywhere else.
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I don't believe so..

Fast User Switching with Mounted Network Drive?

I have a headless G4 Cube running 10.5.8 with a 2TB firewire drive plugged in for storage accessable to any of my macs here at home. I can access it fine with my 2 desktops over ethernet and wirelessly. Recently we decided to consolidate our 2 desktops into one using the muliple users feature. Seems to work fine, and both accounts can access the shared drive. They are logging in with the cube's admin credentials, and the shared drive is set to ignore permissions. I have the drive set to mount on login with a startup item in the system login items prefs. As long as I logout before switching users, everything is good.
The problem arises with Fast User Switching which we'd love to be able to use. I can't figure out how to connect to the drive in one account without the 2nd account then seeing it as a volume without proper permissions, then that account creates a new volume mount for it (which doesn't work with iTunes properly and seems to cause other wierd issues).
Example: So say 'user1' logs in, mounts the drive 'Jukebox'. everything seems OK so far. 'Jukebox' is on the desktop and iTunes finds the music. Now I fast user switch to 'user2' and there is a 'Jukebox' on the desktop with the red minus icon indicating I don't have permissions to access it. If I then browse the network and mount the drive, I end up with ANOTHER 'Jukebox' on the desktop. BUT iTunes doesn't see it properly. If I look in the /Volumes/ folder with the Terminal, I see a mountpoint for 'Jukebox' (with the owner of 'user1' group 'staff') and now a new mountpoint called 'Jukebox-1' (with the owner of 'user2' group 'staff').
It seems when you mount a AFP drive, it creates the Volume with the current user and staff group, but switching to another user then can't access that when it sees it in the /Volumes folder. You try to mount again and it creates a NEW mountpoint, names it with a '-1' at the end and you can use that (but iTunes cant).
So... how does one use a shared drive that you want on BOTH users desktops with Fast User Switching turned on? Is there a way to have the drive mounted BEFORE either user logs in, such that it will be seen as any other local drive (which doesn't have the issue)??
Or is there some other way I can attach to the network volume in each account on login so both have access to music and videos with full permissions?
I'm really stumped here after 2 hrs of googling, searching here and trying things.
TIA

I've not had any luck with the suggestions in the link either.
Here's two other approaches I've tried and failed with:
1. Creating a new share point on the cube itself so that one user can mount it as a different volume. Then the issue is that I still don't have a volume named "Jukebox" available to each user when switching. I DO have access now to the data from both accounts, but under 2 different mount points (volume names) and the xml file for iTunes is hard coded with the path for each mp3 including the "Jukebox" volume name... so no go.
2. Tried figuring out a way I could script a mounting of the share with the terminal thinking I could then run that shell script at startup. Can't seem to get the sytax right. If I create a directory in /Volumes and mount and afp share to it, it takes on the ownership of root/wheel which I can't access in the finder and can't seem to change.
BUT I'll keep playing with both these ideas a bit... the first one might be overcome with a bit of logic and the 2nd if I can get the syntax right to mount the share with afp_mount and give it the correct ownership/permissions such that when a user logs in she/he sees the volume on the desktop and has full r/w access to it.
thanks again. if you offhand know the syntax for that, let me know

Network Drive problems with Fast User Switching

I have a USB drive connected to my Time Capsule and shared to the network. On one of my computers (Mac Pro) I have 2 user accounts which access the data (music, photos). The first one to access the drive after a power on has no problems, and everything works perfectly. However, if I Fast User Switch to the other account, it can see the drive but cannot access it (permission problem apparently). I then have to click the disconnect button in finder, and reconnect, and then can use it again fine. Then when I switch back to the first account its the same deal, having to disconnect and reconnect. It is really annoying, since it marks all my itunes songs as missing and whatnot. Does anyone know how to fix it?
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Yes, under Sharing in System Preferences both users have been added to full access of the drive. I had to do that for the non-admin account to be able to access it at all.

How to get "fast user switching" and network shares playing nice

I've been alternating between banging my head against a wall and reading every forum I could find to try and get a reasonable compromise between using "Fast user switching" and sharing a folder from a file server. It baffles me how the network share/mount model of OSX/AFP is completely killed by fast-user-switching; this is a big problem with Apple requiring users to be actively logged in to share music/video from iTunes which therefore essentially requires fast-user-switching if anyone else wants to use the computer. (anyone find it odd that you can share files without being logged in, but sharing songs requires an active login for each user who is sharing? Apple: time to make iTunes sharing a service!)
For the sake of example, lets just say I want to share my /Groups folder from my desktop and have it be accessible to my laptop. Here are all the things that I tried:
Apple Method 1) Share /Groups in the Server.app on the desktop (running Lion Server), use finder on the laptop and drag the share icon to "Login Items", alternative use a startup Apple script using "mount volume" Both of the options work and will mount the /Groups folder under /Volumes/Groups, of course when the second person logs in via fast-user-switching (and occasionally the first person for no apparent reason), they will get /Volumes/Groups-1 since /Volumes/Groups is already taken. Tomorrow we log in a different order and now the previously /Volumes/Groups-1 user has their mount at /Volumes/Group and vice versa. Any links, aliases, finder sidebar references, and application settings which pointed to yesterday's location are now BROKEN. Not very user friendly to my mother-in-law who is trying to find those pictures of the kids and doesn't know anything about mount points. I also can't reasonably mirror the file location structure on the desktop so that application preferences that are synced between the two (portable home directories) work. fail.
Apple Method 2) Use automounter and set up by hand direct maps for /Groups or an indirect maps for the children of /Groups. Now it will automatically get mounted to /network/servers/SERVER/Groups/ on the laptop and on the desktop it will automatically create a similar symlink structure so that the same path (/network/servers/SERVER/Groups) work both on desktop and laptop. Cool. Except when the second person logs in, the /network/servers/SERVER/Groups/ mountpoint is already owned by the first user and they don't have any permissions to access it. Fail.
Apple Method 3) Use mount_afs and specify directly the mount-points. Have each user have their own startup AppleScript which mounts /Groups to a different location (e.g. /Users/Shared/username/Groups) that way they don't conflict with multiple users. On the desktop, set up symlinks from /Users/Shared/username/Group to /Groups so that it will be the same as the client and applications settings will work when synchronized back/forth by portable-home-directories. Will it work, yes it does, but what a bear to maintain. Is this really what I should expect to do just to have multiple users on my desktop and laptop (which again is essentially required now if I want to do any type of iTunes sharing). This can't be what apple expects.
What I ended up doing - the "not quite apple" solution.
Non-Apple Method 4) After a read of "Autofs: Automatically Mounting Network File Shares in Mac OS X" (http://images.apple.com/business/docs/Autofs.pdf) at the very end there is a single paragraph of "Kerberized NFS": "A Kerberized NFS mount can have multiple connections from multiple users, each using the correct user’s credentials for each transaction. This allows administrators to support multiple users, each authenticated with their own credentials to the same mount point. This is very different from AFP and SMB mounts," (emphasis mine)
It appears that by using good 'ole NFS (abeint with Kerberos for security!) you can actually have multiple users on the same mount point. Roughly following the guidance at https://support.apple.com/kb/TA24986?viewlocale=en_US. What I needed to do was:
1) create /etc/exports on my desktop and add a single line "/Groups -sec=krb5". The existence of /etc/exports triggered a start of nfsd which no longer has any GUI options in Lion.
2) Add a line to /etc/auto_master on my laptop "/- auto_mymounts" to reference a new direct map.
3) Create /etc/auto_mymounts and add a single line "/Groups SERVER:/Groups" to create the direct map.
THAT'S IT. Three lines in three files.
Now when I log into my laptop, there is a /Groups that is a network mount of my desktop's /Groups, same location AND it works for all of my users, even simultaneously.
In the end I'm happy with what I've got, but man was this a difficult path just to support fast-user-switching. In Lion, Apple appears to be getting away from NFS (no longer turned on by default and remove from the GUI controls) but clearly this really useful functionality which doesn't exist in AFP.
I'm really curious, after all this work. Any other ways to accomplish this?

In my example above, yes I chose to mount the share "Groups" to the top of the root since that is where I put it on my server and I wanted to keep them similar; but that was just my preference, it isn't a requirement. You can export and mount from other directories.

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Demetrios wrote:
Local users appear in the *Fast User Switching menu* on our Macs. How can we add users with *Network accounts* on our bound Mac OS X Servers so they appear in the Fast User Switching menu w/out already being logged into the client machine?
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Glad to hear you got all your music files back into your library.
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I have not tried replicating this but might be able to provide some additional information.
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Now a bit of background about volumes and mount points under Mac OS X. Under Mac OS X, any additional drive (or more accurately 'volume') is listed under the 'Volumes' folder, remember also that Mac OS X is a Unix operating system. So just as normal for Unix, the boot drive is '/' or the root level and Volumes is a folder in it. The underlying Mac OS X software automatically 'attaches' and additional volumes as sub-folders in the 'Volumes' folder (in Unix speak these are called 'Mount Points'), if you have an external hard-disc called 'Fred' then this would be represented by the following path
/Volumes/Fred
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/Volumes/Fred
/Volumes/Fred 1
Now getting back to the Fast User switching problem and AFP volumes, when you login to a File Server volume it also is automatically added to the Volumes folder, so if we have a File Server volume called 'Shared' it would look like
/Volumes/Shared
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<pre>
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uiplist="/Users/$u/Library/Preferences/com.apple.systemuiserver.plist"
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fi
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</pre>
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So far, things have gone quite smoothly with the integration except for implementing fast user switching on the single client machine tied to the OS X Server box. I have gone through Profile Manager and under the Login Window settings for the laptop, enabled fast user switching. However, it still does not work on the client machine after the changes were pushed out.
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I found the problem. The device group that the laptop in question was assigned to also has an option for fast user switching that was not enabled. I enabled it there and the problem was resolved.

Network drive and fast user switching OS 10.7

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