On Thursday 10 January 2002 15:29, you wrote: > Hi, > > It's at the moment not possible to make not existing mounts visible. This > would only be possible by mounting them and then you don't need automount > at all. > Perhaps a "hack" that makes the directories visible, will be included in > future releases. > See also autofs-4.0.0pre10/TODO: > > autofs v5 TODO list > ------------------- > * visible mountpoints > > If you want the feature now, you have to install Solaris on your machines > ;-) Or you can use the BSD automounter amd...
On a slightly different subject, I can imagine that for integration with windows/smb networks a special version of automount would be very useful. At the moment there are various GUI implementations of a 'Network Neighbourhood'. I've been thinking about a more low-level equivalent of this, using automount-like functionality. Under a folder '/network neighborhood' or '/smb', the various hosts could be listed, as folders. This information would be gotten from the libsmbclient or by scanning port 139 of a range of hosts. Then each host would have a directory for each of it's shares under it's own directory. In this scenario, considering only anonymous shares, a list of all submount (hostnames or sharenames) would need to be available before mounting them. This means the information for statting the mountpoints should be obtained from libsmbclient, without actually mounting. Only upon entering, not statting, a directory corresponding to a share, would mounting take place. So, for this scheme a daemon similar to automount would be needed, but with extra functionality from libsmbclient. Automount intercepts access to certain directories on a kernel level. The smbclientdaemon would need this functionality too. Would this interfere with automount? or in other words, would the functionality need to be added to automount or could a client like this live on its own? Concluding, I need to mention that this is just a fancy idea of mine, and that I do not have the knowledge of the linux kernel, automount and libsmbclient to implement something like this quickly/at all. Best regards, Jos van den Oever
