I use a number of shares at work on a daily basis; some for file sharing and others are development and staging servers that we use when building our websites and web applications.
Ever since moving to apple and mac os x, I’ve never been happy with the options I’ve had for easily connecting to the remote shares. Nothing ever seemed to work consistently, so for quite some time now, I’ve been doing it manually (Finder > Go > Connect to Server…) every time I needed a share. However, today, I got sick of doing all the steps manually every time I need a remote share. Doing something so small as connecting to a share can become very distracting to your thoughts and process.
I started playing with Automator to solve my problem. I was aware of plenty of other ways to do it, with applescript, etc but I wanted something nice and easy that I could customise and share with my non-computer savvy friends.
In the end, with a little help from macosxhints, I did solve my problem; but it took some time to get there and it seems as though lots of other people are still asking the same question.
For the record, I’ve tried just about every other method to connect (i.e. connecting to the server, and then creating an alias, or dragging it to the doc – none of these methods would consistently re-connect me to the same server). I’ve been using the Automator script for a day now, and it seems to be working great!
You can download the Automator workflow and use it as a kick-start to anyone else having the same problem. All you have to do is open the workflow file in Automator (double click it). Once it has opened, you’ll want to modify Step 2, which is where you list the servers you want to connect to. Simply click the + button, and add as many as you like. Click the play/run button to test the workflow.
I saved the workflow as an application using File >Save As and selecting Application in the File Format drop down. I made an application for each share that I need to connect to, and now it’s a simple matter of double clicking the appropriate application. So far, it has worked without fail every time!
technorati tags:macosx
Filed under: general
YO!! Good day to you Mr Mebberson. Another method that is redundant for you now but may have been useful when you were doing it manually… When you click on that apple thing in the top left hand corner of the screen and navigate to -> Recent Items -> Servers….this displays everything you’ve connected to recently. You just click on the share you connected to and assuming you’ve saved the login credentials in your keychain your done. This script method you describe is one step better though
See you!
Hey! Mr. Harro! Yeah, I tried that a couple of times. But that gave me the same connection problems as when I dragged the already mounted disk onto the dock. For some reason which I can’t figure out, my mac just couldn’t restablish the connection reliably. Sometimes it would, then it wouldn’t, then it would but wouldn’t appear in the Finder; it was crazy stuff. This seems to be the only reliable method for me (I would prefer other options, such as just dragging an already mounted one to the doc, and then clicking on it to re-establish the connection – but it never worked!). We’ll speak soon man!
Thanks that helped. I’ve been playing around with that but couldn’t find out where i was going wrong!
Thanks again.
Jason
I was forced into the MAC world by circumstance and have grudgingly grown to like it but this one has been thorn in my side for 18 months and after reading this it took 2 minutes to set it up so now I never have to manually make my connections again. I can see many other areas where this automator app will be useful. Brilliant thanks
I have tried to use this via ARD with no luck- any suggestions?
Very good hint. Is works perfectly.