Chapter Summary

   

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Automounter is a supplemental product to an NFS client. It is used to automatically mount required file systems and unmount them when not in use. Another advantage of Automounter is that it can be used to balance the load among multiple NFS servers. It also supports fault tolerance such that if a particular NFS server is not available, it can use another NFS server. The automount daemon is used at boot time for this purpose. This daemon uses plain text files, called Automounter maps, for a list of mount points and file systems that can be mounted from a particular NFS file server. It reads its configuration data from the /etc/rc.config.d/nfsconf file and uses a master map file to locate direct and indirect map files. These files contain the local mount points, NFS server name , and exported file system along with mount options. The automount daemon can be started using the command line or the nfs.client script in the /etc/init.d directory at system boot time. It needs to be restarted every time you make a change to the master map file. You must also restart the daemon if you make a change to the mount points in the direct map. However, you need not restart it after any change to the indirect map.

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