On Feb 23, 11:30am, Ronny Ranerup wrote:
> Subject: Re: autofs v4: speak now or forever hold your peace
>
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]:
> >I totally agree. A daemon is a service program which should be able to be
> >started and stopped like any other service program by the system
administator.
> >Especially under Linux, which is one of most stable operation systems I
worked
> >with, it would help to design daemons in a coherent service friendly manner.
>
> I agree with the agreement. But I guess I also understand that it
> might be difficult... AMD was the singularly most crappy program for
> Linux and the only reason we had to reboot our machines (several
> months apart, but anyway). You know the procedure; hmm, can't login,
> go to machine, see several screens of amd messages on console, try to
> kill amd, fail, try to unmount all NFS mounts, fail, try to figure out
> which bloody proc holds the mount, fail, getting damn cold in the
> server room, getting mad, killing all user processes, killing amd,
> killing NFS, bla, bla. Rebooting because the bloody kernel refuses to
> forget some silly old mount...
amd could be killed and restarted with not to much problems - the only thing
are to unmount the automouter directory itself with "umount" (also works for
autofs, if there aren't any submounts) and to use the right option wile
restarting amd. BTW.: amd is now found in am-utils, link see below.
> Another point for the wishlist; since I guess most of the known Unix
> universe is using AMD, a script to parse AMD-maps and generate autofs
> ones would probably be very helpful, as you can see from this list. I
> wrote one myself but it's just a trifle and won't do for serious
> distribution.
That would be a very cool script, because on the other unices there's nothing
available besides amd (and autofs couldn't be ported, as it lives in the
kernel). But maybe it's not so easy - how to convert the "wire" feature and the
replicated server feature ?
The coolest thing would be an am-utils interpreter for autofs or a modification
of am-utils (amd) to use the kernel autofs - I looked at the code, but it's
not so easy it could be done in my spare time.
> More whining... after fighting with AMD and trying to figure out where
> the hell those amd-upl-xxx came from I didn't get happier when trying
> to find autofs, no official web-site, just a ftp archive, already a
> frightening number of strange autofs distributions. A NEWS file in the
> distribution where there are almost no differences between version
> 0.3.14 and 3.1.2. No HOWTO or similar document. No explanation as to
> how the daemon ties into the kernel, no explanation on which version
> of the kernel is needed...
For amd (am-utils): http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~ezk/am-utils/
For autofs: Hmm, at least the FAQ is available somewher on the WWW.
> Yeah, I know, a lot of whining. Sorry. On the positive side, autofs
> _might_ be less buggy then AMD... ;)
hpa seems to love simplicity, so you are probably right.
Thanks for all work done.
Greetings
Hermann
