I'm quite new to autofs, but speaking about features I'd like to see
something like a browsing mode AMD has, so one can list mounts
available for a given mounting points, without actually mounting them.
On a side note: what I heard being called as 'mount attack' is at the
moment the main problem with automounter on my home machine. Namely,
looking at the content of directory, which contains symlinks to my
mount keys (like a: -> /mnt/a:, where /mnt is the mount point),
with any file manager (I guess except simple 'ls') mounts all directories
(including unavailable, like floppy drive without floppy, brrr....).
My understanding is that whatever uses stat() call (as ls -l does ??)
bound to get the filesystem mounted,
but still, maybe there is some simple solution, which would allow
safe use of file managers with automount running ?
------------------------------------------------------------
On Mon, 22 Feb 1999, H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Okay, I'm planning to do outline the basic data structures of autofs
> v4 over the next several days. Some features are already a given:
>
> * Multimounts/scaffolding (/net being a special case of this).
> * Arbitrary mount point topology, without needing the
> spawn-an-automounter hack.
> * Mounting-process information passed to daemon.
> * Most of the filesystem data will live in "ready-to-eat" kernel data
> structures (inodes, dentries) as opposed to separate backing store.
>
.....................
>
> However, if there is some key feature that I'm missing, please speak
> up now: please send an email explaining the feature and its
> justification, and I will try to fit it into the design.
>
....................
> -hpa
>
>
