Autofs and direct mounts

David Jansen jansen at strw.leidenuniv.nl
Wed Jan 19 16:35:28 UTC 2005


On Wed, Jan 19, 2005 at 11:44:56AM -0000, Plant, Dean wrote:
> I am testing autofs on FC3 with direct mounts read from Solaris NIS maps.
> 
> I have enabled direct mounts by editing DISABLE_DIRECT=1 in
> /etc/sysconfig/autofs.
> 
> On the NIS server I have test direct mount of:
> 
> /admin   -ro amachine:/export/admin
> 
> Which does not work correctly in FC3 but work's fine in Solaris,
> /var/log/messages show's
> 
> cache_ghost: entry in yp:auto_direct not valid map format, key /admin
> 
> When I add the below direct mount, it works as expected.
> 
> /test/admin   -ro amachine:/export/admin
> 
> Is this just a feature of the Linux autofs not fully emulating Sun's autofs
> or is this a bug?

At some point in the past (redhat 7?, I forgot) I tried a similar setup
an dcame to the same conclusion. The Linux autofs doesn't want to
generate mountpoints directly in / but it works to use an intermediate
directory (like /test in your example) to create the mount points in.
This may very well be a safety feature; on Solaris, a misconfigure4d
automounter can have something mount on e.g. /etc and make your system
inoperable. Ort it may just be an unimplemented feature or bug in the
Linux version.
Anyway, what I did back then was modify the configuration to mount all
the Solaris nfs disks under /disks, and where needed, I created symbolic
links in / to point to the mountpoint in /disks (needed e.g. because
some 3rd party software had hardcoded directory names).

David Jansen




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