This article applies only to DS-Clients running on Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).

With the release of Mac OS X 10.6, Apple removed the public API for listing exported volumes. As a result, although the ability to mount volumes and access data remains, the Mac DS-Client is unable to obtain the available volumes for backup. This limitation affects backup set creation, editing backup sets, and restoring data to alternate locations.

This means a default DS-Client installation running on Mac OS X 10.6 cannot use auto-mount backup sets (agentless backup for Mac OS X using Mac-specific API). These are backup sets created by browsing for active Mac volumes on your network (New Backup Set Wizard > Select the computer screen: Local File System\Auto Mount).

The rest of this article deals with a temporary workaround.

To bypass the limitation caused by removal of the Apple public API from OS X 10.6, the Mac DS-Client can use two configuration files named “mountpoints.cfg” and “mountpoints.permissions”. Both are plain-text files, which for a default installation must be located in /Library/CloudBackup/DS-Client/automount/.

The file mountpoints.cfg contains all the available mount points on the remote machines that will be made available by the DS-Client via the DS-User.

The file “mountpoints.permissions” contains the permission rules which will grant or deny users the right to authenticate (i.e. wrong credentials will fail) with the mount points listed in “mountpoints.cfg”.

The file “mountpoints.cfg” contains computer name / volume name pairs, separated by a colon (:) where computer name may be a local domain name or an Ipv4 address). The ‘#’ character denotes a comment and entries following it will be ignored.

The following is a sample mountpoints.cfg file (/Library/CloudBackup/DS-Client/automount/mountpoints.cfg):

The file mountpoints.permissions processes each line as one rule. A rule dictates which users are allowed to authenticate with the listed mountpoints. It is formatted as follows:

The mountpoint list is composed of double-quoted items with comma as a separator. Each item must specify the machine name (or IP) followed by a colon (':') and then the exact mountpoint name or wildcard ('*') to denote all mountpoints (e.g. “MacMach.local:Macintosh HD”). You can exclude an item by using the minus (‘-) sign before the machine name or IP address.

The user permissions list is composed of keywords (cAsE-sEnSiTiVe) and usernames with comma and whitespace as separators. Any user names after the keyword “ALLOW” will be allowed to authenticate with the corresponding mountpoint list. For rules that are intended to apply to all users, the keyword “EVERYONE” can be used. To exclude certain users from the permissions list, place the user names after the keyword “EXCEPT” (note: “EXCEPT EVERYONE” will deny all users right to authenticate with the corresponding mountpoint list). These user names must also be defined on each corresponding machine where they attempt to authenticate.

The following is a sample mountpoints.permissions file (/Library/CloudBackup/DS-Client/automount/mountpoints.permissions):

Changes to these configuration files do not require a DS-Client restart. They will take effect upon the next activity.