I have just recently bought a Synology DiskStation DS209 to serve as a centralized storage for backups, shared files and our music collection.
Since I and my girlfriend share using a trusty old PowerMac G5, we make use of Fast User Switching (FUS) quite a lot. It is a really neat thing – and hey, it’s UNIX anyway so why shouldn’t we have multiple users being logged in to the same computer at the same time.
Here is the clincher: If you want to use a shared AFP network volume it’s all fine and dandy as long as you don’t use FUS. Once you use FUS and User1 mounts ‘music’, it is mounted as ‘/Volumes/music’. User2 then logs in – but can’t access that mounted volume! User2 can now mount that volume again, this time it gets mounted under /Volumes/music-1.
Now this is a major f*ck-up. The reason is quite simple to see. Just take iTunes for example. You want to have a shared iTunes library with all your actual music files residing on the AFP mount? iTunes saves the path to the music files like this: /Volumes/music/albums/… . This means as long as your volume ‘music’ gets mounted under ‘music’ no problem – but if the second user decides to mount it as well it won’t work anymore!
Here’s a discussion in the official Apple support forum regarding the topic. Unfortunately no one has coughed up a working solution so far. Only a crude AppleScript is floating around but I’d like the implementation to be a bit more trustworthy.
I’ll keep you posted how this is getting along. I’m still all set for sharing files from a network drive AND using FUS.