Ray Ballisti, June1998
3) Taking the existence of two OS into consideration
There are many reasons for using the automounter facility. Beside some technical reasons (reducing the idle NFS traffic for instance) there is a hughe amount of comfort for the system manager who just need to modify some files on the server and all machines in the network will behave conformely.
The main idea is that a partition ( a directory) will be NFS mounted on a client only at the moment that it is needed and after a given delay it will be unmounted if not needed.
I should ask you to refer to the manual pages if you wish to know more about this topic: I do not want to duplicate it here!
When a machine boots the auttomounter will be started and at first looks for an entry "auto_master" in the NIS data base. In our network we have such an entry "auto_master" which points to local files "/etc/auto_direct" and "/etc/auto_home". Usually those files are the same on each machine and again they point to others NIS data bases (auto_direct_2.5 or auto_direct_2.6 and auto_home_ifh). But this allows me make acceptions for some special configured machine.
Our auto_master file for the NIS data base is at present:
| #Mount-point | Map | Mount-options |
| /- | /etc/auto_direct | -rw,intr |
| /home | /etc/auto_home | -rw,hard,intr |
| /net | -hosts | -nosuid |
The usual content of /etc/auto_direct file on a "normal" client is simply:
+auto_direct_2.5
(where 2.5 can be 2.6 depending of the operating system. This will be changed soon using environment variables)
The content of /etc/auto_home is for all our machines the same:
+auto_home_ifh
Note that the use of the "+" construct ("+<map name>") is only allowd in a file, i.e. cannot be used in a map itself.
3) Taking the existence of two OS into consideration (19th January 1998)
(Following is just a quick fix of the problem: a better solution using some environment variables will be implemented as soon as possible)
Home directories are not involved: they are the same indipendently of the operating system. For the direct mounted directories we will have to discriminate depending of the OS. For this reason we will split the "auto_direct_ifh" file into two reflecting the necessities of the two operating systems called "auto_direct_2.5" and "auto_direct_2.6".
This means that I will have to modify the file /etc/auto_direct on every machine (!) to reflect this change.
+auto_direct_ifh ==> this should become +auto_direct_2.5 (or 2.6 depending which OS)
But this means that I have to modify the NIS data base to have two entries called auto_direct_2.5 and auto_direct_2.6. For this I have to:
a) create two files in /etc/nisdata called "auto_direct_2.5" and "auto_direct_2.6".
b) modify the /var/yp/Makefile to create the new databases
c) leave the old data base (auto_home_ifh) for compatibility reasons