Automount

[Darin Perusich]

automount is a most usefully tool, depending on your environment. one of
the big uses of automount is for mounting users $HOME directories from
an NFS server to other systems on your network. this can all tie back
into using NIS+ if you choose to defign auto_home maps there.

another useful feature is the ability to select multiple server for
failover in your automount maps, /etc/auto.master, /etc/auto.misc,
/etc/auto.USER_DEFIGNED. lets say you have a HA (high availability)
fileserver that you can mount out to 2 systems. these systems are
cluster together so if one fails the over takes over or they load
balance between each other. these filesystems are then shared out to n+1
linux/unix server. you can specify in your /etc/auto.* file a line like:

/export/something  haserver1:/export/something
haserver2:/export/something ...

so if haserver1 fails, or it to slow the client will go to haserver2 for
the filesystem. it keeps going down the line until it can get the mount
or until all fail. i've done this on our solaris server and it works
well. 


"Wechter, Ron" wrote:
> 
> Automount in Redhat 7.1
> 
> autofs is installed and the RPM query states that it will automagically
> mount and unmount file systems, including floppy drives.  Does this actually
> work?  The daemon is running but I still have to mount and unmount the
> /dev/fd0 everytime I put a floppy disk in there.
> 
> Do I have to invoke something or should I do a rpm -e and did it the ol
> fashioned way?
> 
> Ron

-- 
Darin Perusich
Unix Systems Administrator
Cognigen Corp.
darinper at cognigencorp.com