Although I have a sort of working solutionn to my original problem the automounter is still doing things I don't understand.
I'm having trouble working out how the automount daemon decides on what remote filesystems it should mount.
I have worked out that it's the file /etc/auto.master that controls what automount does but I can't really understand the syntax of that file - the man pages are a little opaque/obtuse.
My /etc/auto.master has the following entries:-
/misc /etc/auto.misc /net -hosts +auto.master
(Plus quite a few unhelpful comments)
I can basically understand the first line, that uses the file /etc/auto.misc to automount CD drives and floppy drives.
I don't really understand what the "/net -hosts" line does, I think it means that you'll get automounted directories in /net from hosts listed in /etc/hosts. Anyway it isn't mounting the directory I'm interested in.
What I really *can't* fathom out is that last line the "+auto,master", it seems to be making automount mount all sorts of things but I can't work out how or why. I *think* it's saying that automount should get an 'auto.master' file from the places defined in the /etc/nsswitch.conf file which has:-
automount: files nis nisplus
but I can't get to find how this actually works and I can't get to see what auto.master it actually uses. The command line nis utilities refuse to admit to there being any automount information. How can I get to see what 'automount' information is available?