[Network] How to automatically mount SMB network sharing drive to Mac OS

I decided to move all my important data to the NAS with Raid 1 protection. I need to mount it on all my desktop/laptop so I can access the files easily. Mount to Windows system is extremely easy. However, it takes me a little while for MAC OS. This article is about how to automatically mount SMB drive to MAC OS.

By saying “automatically”, my goal is to mount a Samba or Windows share on MAC OS to a mount point I desired, have it autoremount whenever it is reachable, and have it automatically reconnect after a reboot, and have the share be accessible by all users(root or non-root).

MAC OS comes with a good feature called “automount”, all we need is to edit “/etc/auto_master” file and add the following line to it:

/- auto_smb

It tells the system to load /etc/auto_smb automatically.
then, edit auto_smb to include all the mount point you want, the format is:

/Volumes/mount/to/point -fstype=smbfs,soft ://user:password@server_ip/share

if you are using guest without password, use:

/Volumes/mount/to/point -fstype=smbfs,soft ://guest:@server_ip/share

Finally, run the command below to enable it, or simply reboot the computer

automount -vc

when you finish all those steps, whenever you try to access the files, the system automatically try to connect to the server.

It’s not a problem to me, but some users report that they cannot access the mounted files as non-root user, looks like it’s a known bug of MAC OS, here is a workaround:

Add the following codes to a script, run it after each reboot. It unmount the mount point with root privileges and adding back using the non-root user:

sudo umount /Volumes/mount/to/point
cd /Volumes/mount/to/point