Enhanced AutoFS Administrator's Guide

An Introduction to AutoFS
Comparing AutoFS with Automounter
Chapter 1 7
Comparing AutoFS with Automounter
Starting with the HP-UX Extension Pack release, August 1998 (for
HP-UX 11.0), the new automounting utility, AutoFS, was available. Now,
AutoFS has been enhanced to include the features of the SUN ONC+ 2.3
AutoFS. Automounter will become obsolete from the HP-UX release 11i
version 2.
AutoFS mounts directories automatically when users or processes
request access to them. It unmounts them automatically if they have
been idle for a configured period of time (10 minutes, by default). AutoFS
has the following advantages over old Automounter:
• With AutoFS, the configured mount points are the actual mount
points.
• You do not have to stop AutoFS to change your AutoFS maps. The
AutoFS daemon, automountd, runs continuously. When you make a
change to an AutoFS map, you run the automount command, which
reads the maps and then exits.
• AutoFS can support different types of file systems, including NFS
(protocol versions 2 and 3), HFS, CacheFS, VxFS, and the HP CIFS
Client file system.