Ok, just to clear this up with correct information, since it appears that in general understanding of Solaris automount is not good.

1. Client does not always mean another machine.
2. Server does not always mean a machine acting as an NFS server
3. Solaris automounter does not only use nfs


1. A physical machine can act as both an automount server and and automount client. On the client side automount does not mount any filesystem until an attempt is made to use it.

2,3. Automount supports (enforces) the use of LOFS ( loopback filesystems ) as automount targets on a local system, in fact even if the filesystems are nfs shared they will be mounted as lofs locally.

This is commonly seen for /home where the actual directories are /export/home/username and a automounted to /home/username.