dpocius

Yes I did, and oops, I meant to post to that article instead of this one originally. My bad. I've been fiddling with the Automator script to try to get it to work, more to learn about Automator than anything. When I connect to my NAS, I have to explicitly select a share to connect to. I forget now whether this is mandatory with the LaCie drive, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, there's a user name and password associated with that action which seems to be taken care of during the startup process through the Keychain facility. One thing I don't understand is the difference between connecting through the Finder panes (select Network, than the NAS item, then connect to the share) and Go/Connect to server. I had read something somewhere that indicated one method is preferable to the other when setting this up as a startup item, but no reason was given why. Both seem to get me to the same place when done manually.<br /> <br /> Where I worked in a previous life, I was used to being connected to a number of shares on the company network and having those connections persist, except for genuine system failure issues. What's bugging me here is that an idle connection to the share on my NAS will time out after a period of time (a few hours, maybe) and I'll have to reconnect manually. This doesn't seem to happen if I'm using it periodically (like when listening to iTunes). I'm thinking I should write some kind of a ping app that periodically refreshes the connection in the background. I'm wondering if anyone out there has seen and dealt successfully with this behavior.<br /> <br /> Thanx again for your patience with a noob. We could move this discussion over to the proper article if you like.

Thanks for the hints. I tried fooling around with Automator, but no joy. My system is a bit different: iMac Intel Core Duo, 10.4.11, LaCie NAS connected through a Linksys wireless router to the Airport wireless on the Mac, and the iTunes library is on a share on the NAS server with keychain-stored authentication. I can connect on startup fine with the share in the user account startup list, but the connection will vanish after awhile, and I typically won't notice until I start iTunes. Quitting iTunes, connecting manually, and restarting iTunes works fine, but is of course an annoyance. I was looking to test your idea as a way to create a "stickier" connection. So, what is different about connecting via Go/Connect to server vs. through the Finder window? Any other ideas about where to go with this?