> On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 05:56:59 AM PDT, Rick Troth <[email protected]>
> wrote:
> storage admin might truly dislike: auto-create a USS filespace for each user.
Storage admins who don't like auto-create can create filespace by hand. Are you
saying auto-create does not meet the needs for all?
> automount has some advantages, though no, it's not always implemented
> elegantly.
Elegance is often not achievable when creating for something that already
exists. IBM had few choices because of the faults of filesystem, Unix and z/OS.
Automount was created specifically to address some filesystem blemishes.
There's a problem they needed to solved and they allowed people to continue
without the use of automount. For those who choose automount, they decided that
with all its faults, it solved more problems than it created. This is true for
all software whether it's Unix or z/OS. The solution to a problem usually
changes the problem.
On Monday, August 7, 2023 at 05:56:59 AM PDT, Rick Troth <[email protected]>
wrote:
> However it is not reality show or beauty contest, rather I'd like to
see some real advantages of automount.
Last week I learned of a peculiar use of automount in z/OS which is
different from my experience and which a storage admin might truly
dislike: auto-create a (possibly large, in any case yet another to
manage) USS filespace for each user.
Yuck.
So I get it that some find automount counter productive.
My experience has always been quite different, whether with z/OS or
elsewhere.
The mounted objects are often sub-directories of a shared space
(advantage: NOT creating countless additional spaces to manage).
The mounted objects are called for on-demand (advantage: NOT requiring a
large table of filesystems to mount when the system starts).
I was blown away the first time I ran 'df' on USS. So many things mounted!
And many of them were program products. As a long time Unix person and
sometime Unix admin, I do find program products to be excellent
candidates for their own mount point (whether also their own physical
space or shared).
Automounter could dramatically reduce the number of things needing mount
at boot time.
My first experience with automounter was for user home directories (in
that case, always residing in shared spaces on the back end).
But that was the time of shared workstations: a users home dir was not
mounted until she signed on.
Summary: YES, automount has some advantages, though no, it's not always
implemented elegantly.
-- R; <><
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