UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,
I was reading about automounting on Solaris10 and faced with the following sentence:

"When the automount daemon is initialized on the server, no exported directories are mounted by the clients."

What does it mean? Could you please explain? What is "exported directories" ?

Thanks

It mans what it says, if you start the automount daemon on a server nothing happens on a client.

Exported directories = nfs shared filesystems.

I can see that there is directory;
/home under / and when I need to indicate it to Solaris, I should type /export/home all the time.

Why should I type /export/home ? What is the difference between /home and /export/home ?

Thanks

"When the automount daemon is initialized on the server, no exported directories are mounted by the clients."

which exported directories were being told about? On server side or client side?

In the Network File System (NFS) there are two types of filesystems:

1) A filesystem mounted local on the NFS server which is exported

and

2) A filesystem remote to the client system which is mounted across a local filesystem. Like this:

SystemA is the host and has filesystem /home/blog which is NFS exported.

SystemB has a local filesystem /home/blog and the remote filesystem /home/blog from SystemA is NFS mounted across it. The result is that only the files on SystemA /home/blog will be seen. Do not mix up the local filesystem /export with the NFS "Exported" filesystems they are two different things.

Hope this helps.

Forgot to say that all the automounter does is automatically mounts the remote filesystem after a client system re-boot for example. It is all to do with NFS.

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.