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Re: Seriously confused by autofs



On Mon, Mar 14, 2005 at 03:05:34PM -0600, Rob Brenart (TT) wrote:
> This seems like one of those things that should be easy as can be, but
> I'm not getting anywhere... so with the assumption that I'm just digging
> myself in deeper and over thinking it, I'd like to pose the problem here
> and ask for help.
>  
>  
> The issue, I have several windows and a solaris box mounted from my
> linux server, but due to network outages, power outages, stupid users
> turning their servers off on occasion, etc... the mounts occasionally go
> dead. As it stands, my solution to this is to go into the linux server,
> umount and then mount the mount point. Then everything is good again,
> until the next thing comes up.
>  
> The solution I've been led towards, autofs
>  
> Ok... going to boil this down to one machine and one share (I'll do a
> windows one)...
>  
> As it stands, in my /etc/fstab I have
>  
> //machine/share /mnt/backups smbfs
> credentials=/etc/fstabpwds/credfile,rw,user,gid=sambawrites,fmask=0774,d
> mask=0774 0 0
>  
> Ok, now I've done an apt-get install autofs, and it went fine. I know
> have two new files I believe I'm supposed to worry about.
> /etc/auto.master & /etc/auto.misc
>  
> So my auto.master looks like
>  
> /misc /etc/auto.misc -timeout=60  #I know I don't want this kind of
> timeout for my particular issues, but right now I just wanna get it
> working at all
>  
This tells the automounter to start a daemon waiting for requests on sub-
directories of /misc, so

> Then in my /etc/auto.misc I have
> Backups -fstype=smbfs,login=<login>,passwd=<pwd> machine:/share
>  
it would trigger mounting when someone tries to access /misc/Backups.

> I should be using /etc/auto.mnt I think? With /mnt /etc/auto.mnt in the
> my auto.master... but then can I define multiple points under /mnt when
> I start adding others?
It doesn't matter what the configuration file is called, but the first
field of auto.master gives the base directory where all the mountable direc-
tories are located...

> I don't know at all if this machine:/share is the right syntax, it seems
> to be what I find in the tutorials online, but most of them use
> automount for local devices
Hm, I'd suggest using the same syntax as in fstab, //machine/share.
I think it's passed to mount without any preprocessing, so the syntax
should be the same - but I don't know for sure. Try a few methods and check
your syslog for strange output. :)

> I'd also like to use a credential file in the auto.misc, but that's
> another problem... like I say, right now I just want it to work.
Should be no problem - those autofs-Maps take the same mount arguments
as fstab (besides -fstype, which is special to autofs).

> Am I supposed to remove my entry in the /etc/fstab?
Yes, you can. Autofs will mount the directory without looking at fstab
anyway (that's what it has its own configuration for (auto.master, auto.misc...).
And you don't _want_ to mount that entry manually anymore.


So, if you have

/etc/auto.master:
-----------------
/misc /etc/auto.misc -timeout=60

and

/etc/auto.misc:
---------------
Backups -fstype=smbfs,login=<login>,passwd=<pwd> machine:/share

there should be something like

root@__:/$ mount
[...]
automount(pid568) on /misc type autofs ([more options])

and trying to

root@__:/$ cd /misc/Backups

should either succeed (try 'mount' and 'ls' afterwards to see if the
automounter daemon actually mounted something, and successfully) or
throw some interesting output to syslog.


HTH,

Jan
-- 
Jan C. Nordholz
<jckn At gmx net>

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