Bryan Whitehead wrote:
Thanks for the kick in the pants. Looks like autofs can do what I need. Looks like this "feature" slipped in during 9.0 (or 8.2) and I didn't notice.
Now if only autofs would support direct mounts we'd be another step closer to Solaris... ;)
Could you explain what it is/how it works?
auto_direct allows you to assign a directory a specific disk/nfsserver when it is accessed. this means you can make any directory managed by autofs without having autofs control the parent directory.
most common use of direct mount is /var/mail.
This config wants "mail" in /var/ to be mounted from a nfs server, but you can't have "/var" managed by autofs. So autofs will watch the "mail" directory directly. When a program enters/opens the directory autofs will mount the directory from it's configured source. An auto.direct entry would look like this:
/var/mail -actimeo=0 s383:/export/mail
someone may say... "why don't you just keep in mounted??!?!". Because of stale NFS handles when servers go down. Even when the server comes back up the client may be hosed... if you have several hundred workstations this can suck real fast. NFS mounts should only be mounted when "in use". If no one is looking at /var/mail then /var/mail should not be mounted via nfs.
Currently on linux we would have to change /var/mail to be a symlink to /net/s383/export/mail. However, this becomes a problem when applications decide to save the "mail folder" as /net/s383/export/mail. If we move our mail services to another server we'll have problems. But mail is just a simple stupid example...
/usr/local is software that is installed by the SA. Many shops share this over nfs (very common at JPL) so each workstation can have new software by installing it on the server... auto_direct would look like this:
/usr/local -rw s383:/export/opt/local
having /usr/local as a symlink to /net/export/opt/local can screw up many things. For example, if a project compiles software on their workstation configure/makefiles and binarys can end up with /net/export/opt/local in them... resulting in huge problems when servers are moved, or decommissioned.
-- Bryan Whitehead SysAdmin - JPL - Interferometry and Large Optical Systems Phone: 818 354 2903 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
