I work with a lot of Windows servers. This means connecting to a VPN and then mounting a share via Samba (SMB). Alas, Keychain won’t autofill saved passwords for Windows servers where the username is prefixed with a domain, like authstephanieleary.
The current best practice for managing lots of these shares is, from what I can tell from hours and hours of Googling and consulting an Apple training rep:
- Create an alias once you’re connected to the share.
- Disconnect.
- Delete any previously saved passwords you have in Keychain for that server.
- Reconnect to the alias and have Keychain save THAT password.
But even this does not work reliably. As you can imagine, once you start working with four or five of these things, it becomes challenging to remember the appropriate combination of VPN, server/share, domainusername, and password.
Today, after YEARS of struggling (intermittently) with this, I finally remembered something: you can save usernames in the connection string. And — this I knew — you can save connection strings as favorite servers in the Finder’s Go → Connect to Server window.
- This book is about getting your Mac to work when it isn’t. It covers both OS 9 and OS X, and deals with networking, hardware, and connectivity issues as well as with more general “configuring your OS to do x” matters. If you’re an advanced user, you already know everything in this book.
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If your Mac is using an earlier version of any Mac operating system, you should install the latest Apple software updates, which can include important security updates and updates for the apps that are installed by macOS, such as Safari, Books, Messages, Mail, Music, Calendar, and Photos. This depends on condition and specs, if it's fully loaded and boxed in as new condition maybe £120 If it's not then £30 - £50 at best. The thing to remember with old computers is they are only worth what someone is willing to pay.
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UNIX geeks are probably laughing at me right now.
Mac Os For My Mac
One more quick search confirmed that I can save not only the username, but also that pesky domain prefix and, yes, the password too. Here’s the syntax:
smb://domain;username:password@server/share
Short Book For Mac Os 10.10
(From a tip on the invaluable Mac OS X Hints site.)
Short Book For Mac Osx
This is nowhere near as secure as Keychain, since it makes the password visible to anyone who sits down at the computer and opens up the Connect to Server window. For my purposes, that’s OK — no one else uses my laptop. This just goes on the list of passwords I’ll have to reset if the laptop is ever lost or stolen. And my list of connections wasn’t secure anyway, because I had to save them all in a text file that I could pull up every time I needed to switch servers.