Synergy Desktop Path Error

I recently started working on a mobile project which afforded me the opportunity to flex my iOS development skills again. I installed the latest version of Synergy on my MacBook and my main laptop. I used the setup I had before which loaded correctly, but I started receiving this error which prevented me from connecting my Mac to my PC host.

ERROR: failed to get desktop path, no drop target available, error=2

Googling wasn't fruitful so I looked at the settings which looked as I expected. I finally tried unchecking the "Elevate" checkbox and clicked "Apply". The error went away and I was able to connect. "Elevate" should mean that the service will run in elevated/administrator mode. I found no events being raised in the event log and I believe I had the Synergy application successfully using the Elevate option in the past. Whatever the root cause was, not using the "Elevate" option fixed the issue.

For those that do not know about Synergy, it is an
application which allows you to share your keyboard and mouse with other computers over a network. I have been using Synergy for years and find is especially useful when I need to switch between multiple computers frequently.

Accessing a Network Share in OSX

It is not obvious how to access network drives in OSX. Thankfully knowing a little Linux goes a long way. My main need for this was to create a way to access a shared Git repository on a network share.

cd /Volumes
mkdir netshare
mount -t smbfs //username@server/netshare netshare

This can be condensed to just one line.

mkdir /Volumes/netshare && mount -t smbfs //username@server/netshare /Volumes/netshare

If the network share requires authentication, a password prompt will appear.

In good fashion it is good to know how to undo what you did; here is the unmout command.

umount netshare
rm -r /Volumes/netshare

Lock Your OSX Computer

Fun tip. It is not obvious how to lock an OSX computer without logging off. After some searching a ran across a Gist which suspends the current session. This is equivalent to locking (Win+L) a Windows computer.

    #!/bin/bash
    /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -suspend

If you save that into a file, you can make it executable by running:

    $ chmod 755 lock

This works great since I always have a terminal window open. Presuming the file is accessible via the path. I can just run the following and it locks the Mac.

    $ lock