Automatically mount Zima NFS on MacOS

My zimaboard has two 22TB drives, mirrored and available to other devices on my network. I separately have a Mac that needs persistent access to the NFS hosted on my zimaboard. Zima is hardwired into router, Mac is 2 feet away and connects using Wifi6.

I have a volume on my zima I want to mount, automatically, into macOS. Every day, it disconnects for reasons unknown. How can I make the mount persistent? I would think that since the Zima software for MacOS helped me set up access to the drive from within macOS, that it would also help me persist the mount, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

The result of this is that my jellyfin server, which is running on my Mac and uses the zimaboard’s NFS as storage, will stop being able to load any content, every day, until I manually reconnect to the network volume.

I have disabled sleep on my Mac and tried

  1. Login Items, which is configurable happens when I log in and volume mount will be handled by Finder. this doesn’t work.
  2. auto mount via /etc/automount_master
  3. launchAgent

none of these worked and I don’t know of any other way. I’d think that Zima software would offer this feature baseline/by default, but I couldn’t find a setting or anything to toggle this.

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I believe nothing is “wrong” with your ZimaOS NFS share. This is usually a macOS behaviour.

Even with sleep disabled, macOS can still drop NFS mounts when WiFi briefly roams/power-saves, when the router renews the DHCP lease, or if the NFS server has a small hiccup. If the share was mounted via Finder (or Login Items), it’s not really designed to be service-grade persistent, so it won’t reliably reconnect by itself.

What you need to do is:

  • Stop relying on Finder mounts for Jellyfin storage
  • Configure the NFS share as a system automount (mount at boot)
  • Add auto-remount/keepalive so if the share drops for a moment, it reconnects automatically

Once mounted this way, your Jellyfin library path stays stable and it won’t break daily anymore.