Automounting nfs shares

[John Talbut <john@dpets.demon.co.uk>]

I have a small home network with nfs set up so that the computers can share 
files.  Commonly only one of the computers is running, particularly at first.  I 
would like the running computer(s) to automount the nfs shares from the other 
computers when they come on line.

I have been using a line in etc/fstab to mount the shares.  This works with the 
one problem that a boot time there is a delay and a failure message as the 
computer tries to mount the shares from computers that are not on line.

I use gnome-volume-manager (gvm) to automount hardware devices.  This, of 
course, responds to HAL events and I presume that a computer coming on line on a 
network does not cause the kernel to generate a HAL event.  Is there any way of 
getting gvm to automount nfs shares?

Alternatively, I have read that some people uses autofs to automount nfs shares. 
 Would there be any problems with using autofs alongside gvm and udev?

John