Saturday, May 12, 2012

Mac: how to make a server photo screen saver work

I wanted to share a common set of screen saver slide show images across 3 of our Macs. First I put them an old G5 with abundant storage. It seemed to work, but if there was any interruption of our wifi network other machines couldn't reconnect. (Disregard the marketing. Wifi is much slower and much less reliable than wired.)

So I put them on our Time Capsule NAS share. That worked, but if a client logged out or a machine restarted the share wasn't remounted.

Sigh. OS X Networking is reliably disappointing. I remember network shares being more reliable in 10.3, and that using a share shortcut mounted the share. Certainly shares worked better in MacOS Classic (albeit a lot more slowly).

What seems to help is mounting the share on startup by adding it to one or more user's login items. After this the screen saver image slide show survives a restart.

(There are ways to mount drives on boot for all users with vifs.app editing of etc/fstab, but it looks risky to me and I read reports of "finder problems".)

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