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19.3. autofs

One drawback to using /etc/fstab is that, regardless of how infrequently a user accesses the NFS mounted file system, the system must dedicate resources to keep the mounted file system in place. This is not a problem with one or two mounts, but when the system is maintaining mounts to many systems at one time, overall system performance can be affected. An alternative to /etc/fstab is to use the kernel-based automount utility. An automounter consists of two components. One is a kernel module that implements a file system, while the other is a user-space daemon that performs all of the other functions. The automount utility can mount and unmount NFS file systems automatically (on demand mounting) therefore saving system resources. The automount utility can be used to mount other file systems including AFS, SMBFS, CIFS and local file systems.
autofs uses /etc/auto.master (master map) as its default primary configuration file. This can be changed to use another supported network source and name using the autofs configuration (in /etc/sysconfig/autofs) in conjunction with the Name Service Switch mechanism. An instance of the version 4 daemon was run for each mount point configured in the master map and so it could be run manually from the command line for any given mount point. This is not possible with version 5 because it uses a single daemon to manage all configured mount points, so all automounts must be configured in the master map. This is in line with the usual requirements of other industry standard automounters. Mount point, hostname, exported directory, and options can all be specified in a set of files (or other supported network sources) rather than configuring them manually for each host. Please ensure that you have the autofs package installed if you wish to use this service.

19.3.1. What's new in autofs version 5?

Direct map support
Autofs direct maps provide a mechanism to automatically mount file systems at arbitrary points in the file system hierarchy. A direct map is denoted by a mount point of "/-" in the master map. Entries in a direct map contain an absolute path name as a key (instead of the relative path names used in indirect maps).
Lazy mount and unmount support
Multimount map entries describe a hierarchy of mount points under a single key. A good example of this is the "-hosts" map, commonly used for automounting all exports from a host under "/net/<host>" as a multi-mount map entry. When using the "-hosts" map, an 'ls' of "/net/<host>" will mount autofs trigger mounts for each export from <host> and mount and expire them as they are accessed. This can greatly reduce the number of active mounts needed when accessing a server with a large number of exports.
Enhanced LDAP support
The Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, or LDAP, support in autofs version 5 has been enhanced in several ways with respect to autofs version 4. The autofs configuration file (/etc/sysconfig/autofs) provides a mechanism to specify the autofs schema that a site implements, thus precluding the need to determine this via trial and error in the application itself. In addition, authenticated binds to the LDAP server are now supported, using most mechanisms supported by the common LDAP server implementations. A new configuration file has been added for this support: /etc/autofs_ldap_auth.conf. The default configuration file is self-documenting, and uses an XML format.
Proper use of the Name Service Switch (nsswitch) configuration.
The Name Service Switch configuration file exists to provide a means of determining from where specific configuration data comes. The reason for this configuration is to allow administrators the flexibility of using the back-end database of choice, while maintaining a uniform software interface to access the data. While the version 4 automounter is becoming increasingly better at handling the name service switch configuration, it is still not complete. Autofs version 5, on the other hand, is a complete implementation. See the manual page for nsswitch.conf for more information on the supported syntax of this file. Please note that not all nss databases are valid map sources and the parser will reject ones that are invalid. Valid sources are files, yp, nis, nisplus, ldap and hesiod.
Multiple master map entries per autofs mount point
One thing that is frequently used but not yet mentioned is the handling of multiple master map entries for the direct mount point "/-". The map keys for each entry are merged and behave as one map.
An example is seen in the connectathon test maps for the direct mounts below: 
/- /tmp/auto_dcthon
/- /tmp/auto_test3_direct
/- /tmp/auto_test4_direct