UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Well, with autofs filesystems are mounted on demand and umounted when not used.
You need to install autofs and then configure it, normally you have to edit:

/etc/auto.master

To define maps. And perhaps edit/create

/etc/auto.xxx

depending on what you want.

I don't know if SuSE or RedHat install autofs by default, I'm a debian user

Have a look at autofs manpages for details and examples.


Before you ask me, Im going to give you an example

Let's say you want to mount the /xxx filesystem from "aserver" on the /nfsmounts/xxx directory of "bserver".

Then, in "bserver", you would add a line in /etc/auto.master like this:

Code:

/nfsmounts   /etc/auto.mymounts

After that you would create a file named /etc/auto.mymounts with a line like this inside:

Code:

xxx          -ro,soft,intr           aserver:/xxx

Everytime you modify /etc/auto.master, you need to restart the service. So you will need to restart autofs in this case.
Finally, just "ls /nfsmounts/xxx" will mount the filesystem automatically.

Regards.