NFS + Autofs mounting issue
 

OS : SLES 9
autofs Ver. : 3.1.7

I will brief an issue we are facing at one customer location.

They use NFS+Autofs for sharing and mounting

There are 3 Servers, say A, B & C

DIR1 is a share @ A
DIR2 is a share @ B

They want to mount the two Directories on Server-C.

In normal scenario it works, but here the problem is that they want to mount DIR1 on SHARE directory of Server-C, and mount DIR2 under DIR1
I.e.
1) DIR1 od Server-A -> Server-C/SHARE/DIR1
2) DIR2 od Server-B -> Server-C/SHARE/DIR1/DIR2

The first one is working properly, but when we implement the 2nd one, since remounting happens for DIR1 the contents are not accessible.
The user have informed that the same scenario work with both HP-UX 11.11 and Solaris 2.8

Any suggestions?

I think you need the options fsid=0,rw,root_squash,sync,no_subtree_check for the DIR1 share and
rw,root_squash,sync,no_subtree_check for the others. Check this out for yourself. Also look at timeout options. A problem on server A or B might cause considerable difficulty for the clients.

The dir2 share probably should be mounted on Server A rather than on Dir1/Dir2 of Server B.

I'm not using autofs so I don't know if this will affect things. Also, my nfs version is 4.0.

The Linux automounter(3.x & 4.x) does not support direct maps or mount trees
ie more than one filesystem to be mounted under a specific automount point

5.x version of automounter have this facility but i don't want to migrate to that.
Is there any other alternative?