You may be right, but I believe that Linux is not Windows and everything can be solved here making system not only secure and stable but also user-friendly too. That's why I have chosen Slackware - to configure (somebody can say tweak) it to work how I want without losing stability.

BTW, each person has a right to his own opinion and that's very good. It makes difference in this world.I respect you for having it.

That's why so many distros, with so many different levels of configurability, configured differently for different kinds of users.

Agreed on that.

P.S. One point why I like automounting. I constantly use my camera, so it's quite boring for me each time I connect it run mount blah blah. Especially, when it is being disconnected (unknown reason for me) after 15 minutes of idleness.

YUCK. Autofs DOES NOT work this way at all.

It doesn't mount anything until you want it to. Here's an example:

1. Insert CD
2. $ cd /mnt/auto/cdrom
3. CD automounts & you can do whatever you have to
4. $ cd ~
5. CD auto unmounts. You can eject it now, or leave it in the drive until you want/need to access it next.

With Autofs, you can still leave your old mountpoints alone and mount your media manually if you wish. It doesn't get in the way at all, as long as you make a new mountpoint for the automounter. In my case, I made it /mnt/auto.

And Geeman is right. Automounting & autorunning are two very different animals. Autorunning is the work of the devil. AFAIK, Autofs doesn't support autorunning out of the box. Autorunning turned me away from DBUS & HAL. Autofs is great.

No, it won't allow you to eject if something is still using the device. But in this situation, "umount" won't work either, so this is a moot point. You can still use the "fuser" command to work out which process is using the device.

Has anyone tried autofs 4.2?

Peace...

Sorry, I should point out that all the above is in reference to the version of autofs which ships with Slackware (autofs-3.1.7 IIRC) and the autofs kernel module (not the autofs4 version).

I haven't tried the later version because I only really wanted to use it for removable media. By my understanding, the features added in version 4 are better suited to people using Autofs in distributed networks. But I'm probably wrong.

That's cool. I haven't used autofs and noticed 4.2 is newer (by 4-5 years) and wanted to know if anyone here had used it.

Peace...

Has anyone here tried running automounting together with LDAP (under the NIS schema) to automatically mount users home-directories when they log in? This is _very_ useful for laptop users who want to bring their data with them locally, but still have their data available when working on a server or desktop in the same network..

Anyone?

-Y1

how you you guys do the autounmounting.. mine only works for mounting but when i type cd .. it wont auto unmount. please help.

It should. You must make sure that there is nothing accessing to the device's mount point.

Use the "fuser" command to see which process is accessing the device:

$ fuser /dev/hdd

I can see the potential uses, and pifalls, of autofs. While, for me, it may come in handy for my usb media, I won't even THINK of using it for automounting remote media. Security.....

thanks... that fixed things out.

My 2 Cents: I think you all are right.

dunric: I guess you say it all. Unix/Linux have a strong history as server systems, where you definately don't want something like autofs, except for some very special, non-standard purposes (thinking of a CD copy cluster and things like that). On desktop systems, however, the opposite is true, and some more comfort is quite welcome.

Harishankar: Linux developers' reason to think users should mount and unmount devices manually is obviously that they wanted (and still want) to build a valid free Unix clone. BSD on the other hand *is* Unix, and the Automounter was invented there.
I think the philosophy here is not to have every user do everything manually, but to provide options for choice. You want to (un)mount by hand? Well, that's fine. You like the comfort of autofs? Then just use it.
Let me add a note about SuSE: It's my other favourite distribution, and I have been using it much longer than Slackware, and am still using it on some machines. But exactly the Automount/Autoplay things are points of constant criticism in recent SuSE versions, just like the USB device management. I *love* SuSE, but I'd not be surprised if your problems were distribution specific, in parts.

Geeman2.0: When you have dozens of terminal open with PWDs on media that you would like to unmount the system will prevent you from doing so, no matter if you mounted the media manually or with the aid of autofs. The result is that the device is mounted, and as long as some applications are using it, it cannot simply be unmounted. Which is correct, and just fine. Any system that behaves differently is Microsoft Windows... Or did I get you wrong?

gargamel

[EDIT: SOLVED! - turns out I had a permission mismatch. With the rc.autofs pointed out in the initial post it works perfectly with the file entries as pointed out below /EDIT]

Hi all,

I am trying to get autofs to work for my home directory and created an auto.master and auto.home map which contains the following:
and auto.home :

asterix is my laptop where I keep my own home directory, and majestix is the server where the rest of the family has their home directories..

Then I loaded the module successfully
(and verified with lsmod)

My question is - how do I get this to mount the directories properly? Having read a bit too many contradictary howto's I'm a bit confused at the moment, so any pointers will be greatly appreciated..
Do I need to add anything in /etc/fstab or not? I've seen various references to vfstab, but that's probably SVR4 and not Linux...

Thanks much!

-Y1