I am banging my head against the wall on this one.

I am running a debian squeeze server, and have autofs 5.0.4 installed.

One of my scripts (autofs executable files) is trying to mount some of
my LAN hosts.

The host mount fine at start, but when unmounted automatically, it will not mount again. (At least unless I wait for 2-3 minutes).
The problem is, maybe, that I get these messages in the log:

add_host_addrs: hostname lookup failed: Name or service not known
mount(nfs): no hosts available
failed to mount {myshare}

If I wait a couple of minutes, the share is mounting fine, but that is not an option.

What could it be?

The mount command issued by my script is mounting just fine on the command line after all these error messages, but autofs seems to have a problem with it anyhow.

I have searched all over the web trying to get a reasonable explanation to any of these messages without luck.

I don't think that I can upgrade automount, since this is an embedded device (SheevaPlug), so what is my options?

Just to fill some holes, one of the current mounts is like this:

mount -t nfs -o rw,udp,hard,intr nslu2:/mnt/disk2/shared /shared/nslu2

The mount point on the "faulty" server is "/shared", and the dir mounts fine on the command line, just not after a timeout umount in autofs.

The dir "/shared/nslu2" exists, by the way

The above line mounts fine when executed on the command line, just not automatically after a umount by autofs.

Okay, I solved this one myself. It was because I was sloppy about the output of my executable map file.. :-)

For anyone experiencing the same problem, I'll recommend to read this before continuing.
It may not be relevant to all versions of autofs, but it certainly is good reading.

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/806...a8539g7?a=view

To cut it short, I did a PING in the executable file, that messed up the "option server" output that autofs wanted.
So guys, reading the manual sometimes help.

To make it VERY short for all those who don't know what I'm talking about:

An autofs executable map is supposed to put only two strings (or several pairs) out to std output.

Those are: mount options, and server mount point.
autofs takes care of the local mount point by reading auto.master and the key.

Example output:

-fstype=nfs,rw,hard,intr server.com:/share1

Be sure to pipe all other output from mkdir/ping/etc to /dev/null before exiting (with level 0 on success, 1 on error).
And, remember to check your executable file by calling it with the key name on the command line, to see what it returns. That is what I forgot.

Well, I feel kind of stupid, but at least I've learned something: autofs outputs confusing error messages, even in debug mode.. :-D

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