Lesson 5

Date: 2/19/2009
Network File System (NFS)
Linux for Engineering and IT Applications


Automount 





  • Automounter provides an on-demand method of mounting NFS file system
and automatically unmounts them after a designated time period of inactivity (default 5 min).

    

  • For automount to work, autofs package has to be installed.
The autofs uses so called "indirect" maps.


    

  • Automount maps configuration:

    
The master map /etc/auto.master:
 access directory        indirect map file      timeout in sec.

    /mnt/home         /etc/auto.nfs-home      --timeout 60 
/mnt/software     /etc/auto.nfs-soft      --timeout 300
/mnt/docs         /etc/auto.nfs-docs        

    

A client request to access a directory tree whose root is listed in the 
master map (such as cd /mnt/software) will cause the  automounter to 
search the specified map for a server to satisfy the request.


  • The indirect map files, 

    
/etc/auto.nfs-docs:

    doc1  -ro,soft,intr  server1:/export/docs/doc1
doc2  -ro,soft,intr  server2:/export/docs/doc2

    

/etc/auto.nfs-soft

    matlab   server1:/export/matlab  server2:/export/matlab

    

/etc/auto.nfs-home:

    *   -rw,hard,intr  server1:/export/home/&

    

    

  • To start automount daemon, run

    /etc/init.d/autofs start

    


  • After you modify the maps, run
    •  

    /etc/init.d/autofs reload

    


  • To invoke autofs at the startup, run 

    update-rc.d autofs defaults 

    


  • To verify that the autofs is running,
    • 

    /etc/init.d/autofs status

    







    

    



    		

	
    
	
    
	
		
		
		

                
    

                
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