Introduction

Automount is the modern way to mount directories over a network. It is far much easier to manage and are more economic in bandwith.

In this howto, installation and configuration of a files based configuration autofs will be presented. It is not used a lot anymore, but ["AutofsLDAP"] is very usefull and based on this one. In small business environement, this howto can be usefull.

Installation

Autofs installation is quite easy:

sudo apt-get install autofs

Configuration

For configuring autofs, you have to edit /etc/default/auto.master file. Here is the sample file provided by Ubuntu:

#
# $Id: auto.master,v 1.4 2005/01/04 14:36:54 raven Exp $
#
# Sample auto.master file
# This is an automounter map and it has the following format
# key [ -mount-options-separated-by-comma ] location
# For details of the format look at autofs(5).
#/misc   /etc/auto.misc --timeout=60
#/smb   /etc/auto.smb
#/misc  /etc/auto.misc
#/net    /etc/auto.net

As you see, by default, all is commented out. Each mount point is associated with another configuration file. Most of them are now useless (now modern desktop have automount feature with hal & co). This would be usefull for light desktop. /net and /smb are still usefull.

In Unix world, /net enable automounting distant file system exported by NFS. For exemple, if you have a server named fileserver with a NFS export directory called /export (see ["NFSServerHowTo"] for how to setup a such server), you can mount it by typing in a shell command line cd /net/fileserver/export. In an environment with NFS file servers, such automount can be usefull.

For /smb mount point, function the same way but is for SMB file systems (if you need to authenticate for acceding the SMB share, the automatic way will not function).

Uncomenting /net and /smb is a good solution.

You can add your own mount point with your own options in /etc/auto.master to suit your needs.

CategoryDocumentation