I am running version 2.5 of the software on my ex485. I have a new iMac running Snow Leopard. I can browse the home server from Finder as Guest or as a privileged user if I explicitly tell it who to connect as. However, when I tried to access the server via iTunes on the iMac I had to re-authenticate. I tried to experiment and need to know if I going in the right direction.

I log into my iMac as "Jonny Novice" (not really) with a shortname of jonnynovice. I initially created a jonny.novice account on the WHS since that is my login to my Windows Vista system (which automatically authenticates to the WHS as expected). I decided to create a jonnynovice account on the WHS to see if my iMac would send it's authentication information and login automatically to the WHS shares. No luck.

How does the iMac attempt to authenticate? Does it send jonnynovice with the password to try and log in or does it send the long name "Jonny Novice"?

Is automatic system level authentication even possible between these two systems? I do NOT have the Mac console installed, for reference.

Hopefully I explained my problem correctly. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

It uses the short name.

Once you figure out the credentials that work check the box in the connect as screen to "save this password to my keychain". I shouldn't ask you again after that.

Honestly though I have experienced mac authentication to windows boxes to be rather quirky. My solution is to add the network shares you access frequently to the login items and have them mount upon login.

I', not working on my mac right now or I would post the details. If I get time later I will or you can try to figure it out which is good experience anyway..

Good Luck

I was doing the keychain save previously but decided I wanted a cleaner way of accessing the shares which set me down my current path.

It looks like the keychain is application specific though (remember I am new to OSX). If I tell Finder to connect as a specific user and save the credentials in my keychain I still need to re-authenticate if I access the same share using iTunes I believe (not in front my Mac at the moment).

Also, it I have allowed readonly Guest access to some shares on the WHS and the Finder will connect as Guest and let me access the shares - but iTunes will not.

I will play around a little more this weekend also.

Thanks for the reply.

Connecting via Guest is not a good idea. The account is disabled by default and really shouldn't be used for anything.

As for connecting to your WHS on your Mac: I use the exact same username (short name) on both my Mac and my PC (I use both to connect to the server) with the same password all around. When I got my credentials working I added simply added the mounted shares to my Login Items in the User panel by dragging the mounted icons from my desktop to the list. They pop right up when you log in. Then any appplication can talk to the files contained therein without any other steps needed.

Yes...As rrward stated this is the method I alluded to above and I confirmed it earlier. Login Items is located under System Preferences>>>>Accounts

Highlight your User Name ans select Login Items...You may need to click the Lock to open it which will allow changes. You can click the Lock again to close it once you are done.

Once the mounted share is dragged to the login items area they will automatically mount when you login. Just log out and login again. I believe however that you STILL may need to have the credentials stored in the Key Chain.

@GoHerdIBG
What exactly do you mean by "access the same shares using iTunes"? It might happen that in your situation Finder and iTunes uses different services on the MSS, that is why authentication is requested again. The Finder uses SMB VFS when mount shares from MSS and stores in Keychain rather URL-based authentication info, whereas iTunes might work differently (the exact use-case of what you tried to do is not clear for me).

The Keychain is very complex storage actually, and the looking similar information (auth info) may be saved there very differently by different applications. However it is shared through the system, so when requested parameters matches the fetched info will be the same.

@Land Master,
Does the mount become persistent once added to the login items? I'm not sure I want the mount to be active even if I am not using it.

@bruder,

When I built my iTunes library I simply dragged the items from my mediasmart/music share and each time I access a song it pulls it from the mediasmart (instead of copying it local). I guess I assumed when Finder authenticated to the mediasmart/music share, the system as a whole became authenticated - not just the speicific application.

For reference, I disabled my Guest account in OSX (was only enabled for sharing - I guess by default since I don't think I enabled it) and I disabled the Guest account on the mediasmart. Even though I had an account on the MS with the same name and password I could not access it at all via Finder unless I did a 'connect as'. I was hoping that Finder would attempt to send my login credentials for authentication. Maybe I am still missing something.

Thanks for all of the help.

This is how I did things also. When I created the user account on my Mac I intentionally made it match the account I already had been using on my WHS from my previous Windows XP client user account.

I went into finder and connected to the WHS the first time with "connect as" and made sure to save it in my keychain. I did this with both my iMac and my wife's Macbook Pro.

Neither Mac has ever been challenged for a password when accessing any of the shares on the WHS box.

One weird thing did happen today though. My wife's machine could no longer see the Time Machine volume on the MSS. I suspect that something in the last update on the MSS caused this to happen. Even though she was authenticated with the administrator MSS account through the HP control panel she did not have read or write permissions to the \shares\mac folder. I added the read/write permissions for her user account, rebooted her Macbook and now Time Machine is working again.