In OS X 10.6 how do you mount an AFP share at boot or before user login?

Solution 1:

Not sure that you can. I would think for security reasons a user has to be logged in, so that a set of credentials can be used. There's probably some scripts that are run pre-login though, so I suppose if you specify your credentials in there it would be fine.

Solution 2:

Indeed you can script it all from terminal.

You will want to learn a little about launchd - that will specify when the mount will happen. At $5 the Lingon app from the App Store is great if you don't want to learn launchd configuration files.

Next, you'll need a command to make the AFP mount.

Last, you might learn security command to store or retrieve a password from the keychain if you don't want to store your afp password in the script.

Each of these should be easy to learn more with a few internet searches.

Solution 3:

I would look into AutoFS. You can have AFP mounted on demand (see page 14 of the linked PDF).