On 2003-10-06 21:42:02 +0100 Craig c@wizball.co.uk wrote:

Anyone successfully managed to get this working? I cannot really make sense of some online documents (quite surprised at that).

Quick guide anyone?

You need a top-level map, normally called auto.master, containing lines like:

/path/to/autofs/mount/point /etc/auto.misc

where the first column is the mountpoint and the second is the map file. Then the map file says things like:

kernel -ro ftp.kernel.org:/pub/linux

Then you should see this under /path/to/autofs/mount/point/kernel as soon as you try to access it, but not before. You can pick either or both maps up from NIS with suitable tweaks, which makes for handy networked management. man 8 autofs and man 5 autofs should document this further. You need autofs in the kernel, which you can check by "cat /proc/filesystems" and see if autofs is listed.

One tip: be very careful with NFS mount options. If a server hangs on you, then you can't just kill the thing and restart like you can with the userland amd. You could lose the whole autofs system for the duration unless you have timeouts and interruptable options. Any process trying to touch it will block hard, leading to amusingly high load averages (I think around 120 was my highest before fixing it...).