Can't map smb drive to Macs

[jakalan7]

Hello all,

 

I started in a new school last month and they have a Mac suite, all of the Macs are managed using Apple's Profile Manager, they are primarily used for music software and students can log into them with their AD credentials.

 

The shared drive never seems to map to the Mac, so unless students map the shared drive themselves, they are unable to submit their work to their teacher.

 

However, under profile manager, if I go to the group settings, MacOS, Login Items, I can see the share has been added under Authenticated Network Mounts and Network Mounts as smb://servername.domainname.internal/shared files

 

If I log into any of the Macs and press Mac+K and then write our the FQDN for the share (smb://servername.domainname.internal/shared files) then the network drive maps and I can connect to it, however, when I log out and back in again it will disconnect.

 

I looked at an old forum post on here which suggested using a webloc script, and saving it under Applications, then pinning a shortcut to the dock using profile manager...

 

URL

smb://servername.domainname.internal/shared files

[/size]

 

Weirdly this sort of works, but doesn't. When I open the .webloc file from the dock, a blank Safari screen and the Applications screen with the .webloc application highlighted - I can then drag that onto Safari and it prompts me to open with finder, when I click okay it loads the drive...

 

Am I missing something here?

 

Is there an easier way to map the drive?

[ShellfishClive]

You can do it though AFP shares with, I think the command is:

 

afp://user : password@server/share_name

 

I'd create a user for the share, use those credentials and make this command a shortcut on the Mac dekstop.

 

Edit:

 

To mount a drive I think it's also this:

 

mount volume "afp://username:password@myserver/path/"

 

I can never remember the commands so this may be slightly off!

Edited October 8, 2019 by ShellfishClive

[jakalan7]

Hey, thanks for your reply. I did try to mount with AFP but for whatever reason I couldn't get it to work.

 

However, I did find another fix, rather than adding the SMB share to the Device Groups, add it to the Users or User Groups instead.

 

This worked for me first time, now the drive is mapping to their desktop every time!

 

I guess it's a bit like User or Computer config within Windows GPO perhaps?

[ShellfishClive]

I'm not an apple fan at all so I'm not sure, but as long as it works!

[free780]

Profile Manager isn't very reliable.

[TomPearceGeek]

I'd suggest having a look at 'NoMAD Shares' which we use here. We also use 'NoMAD' but as a bound environment which works very well. It enables you to mount shares based on AD Groups which is useful! It works very well for us.

https://nomad.menu/help/nomad-shares-menu/

[theeggmaster]

What version of MacOS are they on? We had real issues with El Capitan when trying to access network shares, but newer versions worked fine.

[iSteve]

You can script this for your groups, then use Platypus to make the script a clickable 'app', or set that app to run at login for your users. This is what we are doing to get around the fact setting network shares for groups does not work in Profile Manager (as it seems).