On Thursday 10 January 2002 09:07 am, Paul Lussier wrote: > In a message dated: Thu, 10 Jan 2002 12:25:16 GMT > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] said: > >Hi, > > > >I'm having a problem with automount in that when I cd into the automount > >"projects" the sub directories are hidden. > >If I cd into a sub directory that I know exists "/projects/network" then > > it will appear in a ls -l of projects. > > This is not a "problem" but normal behavior of automount. /projects > is a mount point. Until something is mounted, it does not exist on a > client machine, and therefore, you can't see it with ls. When you > 'cd' into it, the OS intercepts your command, passes it off to > automount, which then locates the appropriate file system in the > auto.* maps, and NFS mounts the file system for you in the /projects > directory by doing the equivalent of: > > mkdir /projects/network > mount -t nfs server:/network /projects/network > > When the "automount" time out is incurred, it cleans up after itself > by doing the equivalent of: > > umount /projects/network > rmdir /projects/network > > If you need to know what's "available" under the /projects directory, > you need to know which auto. map this information is kept in. > > If you're running NIS, then use the ypmatch/ypcat commands on the > auto. maps. If you use local files, then grep through the /etc/auto.* > maps. > > HTH,
Paul- Are there any docs available to explain how the OS intercepts this, and moreover, how does it inform autofs that some file under /mnt/autofloppy has been requested? It seems like if the kernel can tell autofs that /mnt/autofloppy is needed, all autofs needs to be is small program that basically does this: if not already mounted then mount /mnt/autofloppy else restart umount counter (umount counter event handler) umount /mnt/autofloppy restart counter if failed Assuming that /mnt/autofloppy has an entry in fstab. I've often wondered why autofs has so much code when mount & umount already do all of this, and it seems like autofs should be just a thin wrapper to call them. I'm sure there is a good technical reason for the extra code and extra complexity. I still have to rely on a rote script in order to successfully set up a simple floppy or cdrom automount that is visible from a GUI. As a matter of fact, the last time was so painful that I swore that I would join this list just to see if I could learn enough about the concept to write a simple automounter that just used the fstab entries and mounted plain mount points, so hopefully distros will begin shipping with automounted drives by default. By relying on mount/fstab, the auto.conf would look like this: /mnt/cdrom 10 /mnt/floppy 2 Or even add them as mount options in fstab and remove the config file altogether: /dev/cdrom /mnt/cdrom iso9660 noauto,ro,automount=10 0 0 Of course, I'm sure autofs would be more appropriate in more advanced cases; I'm just referring to local removable drives here. What would it take to do this? In addition to the autofs source, do you know of any other resources that I can refer to? TIA, -Todd
