Enhanced AutoFS Administrator's Guide

An Introduction to AutoFS
New Features of AutoFS
Chapter 16
New Features of AutoFS
AutoFS has been enhanced to provide the features of the SUN ONC+
version 2.3 AutoFS product. This version of AutoFS is known as
Enhanced AutoFS. The new features introduced with Enhanced AutoFS
are as follows:
• On-demand mounting – In previous versions, AutoFS mounted an
entire set of file systems if they were hierarchically related. However,
Enhanced AutoFS mounts only those file systems that users access;
other file systems that are hierarchically related to these file systems
are mounted as needed. This increases the performance by
preventing unnecessary mounting and unmounting.
• Browsability – Enhanced AutoFS allows a user to view the
directories that can be mounted for indirect maps, without having to
actually mount each file system.
• Device ID – Enhanced AutoFS uses the device id of a mounted file
system stored in the /etc/mnttab file as a reference for a future
unmount. This increases the performance because during
unmounting, Enhanced AutoFS does not have to retrieve the device
id from the remote file system.
• Concurrent mount or unmount – Enhanced AutoFS performs
concurrent mounts and unmounts using a multithreaded
automountd daemon. This results in a performance enhancement,
which prevents services from hanging if a server is unavailable.
• Reliable NFS ping – Enhanced AutoFS supports a -retry=n mount
option for an NFS map entry to configure the ping timeout value
based on the network setup.
• CIFS Client support – Enhanced AutoFS has the ability to support
HP CIFS Client.
• NFS loopback mount – By default, Enhanced AutoFS uses LOFS
mounts for locally mounted file systems. Enhanced AutoFS provides
an option to allow loopback NFS mounts for the local mount. You
need to use this option in the High Availability NFS environments.