1. Introduction
1.1 Revision History
- Versions below 1.5 - Authored by Don.
- Version 1.5 - Added the copyright and other minor details.Rahul Sundaram took over maintainance.
- Version 1.5.1 - Added details to the question about VFAT.
- Version 1.5.2 - Revision history and other minor corrections.
- Version 1.6 - Added a few questions and answers.
1.2 Automount - what and why?
Automounting is the process where mounting and unmounting of certainfilesystems is done automatically by a daemon. If the filesystem is unmounted,and a user attempts to access it, it will be automatically (re)mounted. Thisis especially useful in large networked environments and for crossmountingfilesystems between a few machines (especially ones which are not alwaysonline). It may also be very useful for removable devices, or a few otheruses, such as easy switching between a forced-on ascii conversion mount ofa dos filesystem and a forced-off ascii conversion mount of the same dos fs.If you are new to Linux and dont understand what mounting and deamons are,then refer tosome documentation regarding this.
1.3 Types of automounting
There are two types of automounters in linux; AMD and autofs. AMD is theautomount daemon, and supposedly works like the SunOS AMD. It is implemented in user space, meaning it's not part of the kernel. It's not necessary for the kernel to understand automounting if you NFS mount to the local host, through the AMD daemon, which routes all automount filesystem traffic through the NFS system. Autofs is a newer system assisted by the kernel, meaning that the kernel's filesystem code knows where the automount mount points are on an otherwise normal underlying fs, and the automount program takes it from there. Only autofs will be described in this mini-howto.
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