Automount not equivelent to mount?

Question

I'm struggling to get automount to work as desired.

If I run the following:

sudo mount -t nfs server:/path/to/share /path/to/mount_point

I get the mount appearing fine.

However, if I add the following line to my auto_master:

/path/to/mount_point server:/path/to/share

it creates the mount point directory but the contents aren't visible.

When I observe the output of the mount command, they are different:

• Using the first (manual mount) approach the following entry is returned by mount:

  server:/path/to/share on /path/to/mount_point (nfs)
  

• Using automount I get the following entry returned by mount:

  map server:/path/to/share on /path/to/mount_point (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
  

I assumed that by default, automount mounts via NFS and is equivalent to the manual mount.

What is the correct way to use automount to acheive the behaviour of the (correctly working) manual mount?

The share is hosted on a Linux NIS domain and I am accessing from a Mac (BSD Unix).

Answer 1

The /etc/auto.master file is not the place to set the remote NFS directory path. /etc/auto.master expects to be given a map file or directory. From the auto.master man page:

The auto.master map is consulted to set up automount managed mount points when the autofs(8) script is invoked or the automount(8) program is run. Each line describes a mount point and refers to an autofs map describing file systems to be mounted under the mount point.

So, create a file called /etc/auto.remote (you can change "remote" to whatever you want). Place your mount options in that file. It should have the following format:

share_name  mount_options  server:/remote/path/to/share

Here's one from my system for example:

movies  -rw,soft,intr,bg,rsize=8192,wsize=8192 192.168.0.72:/nfs_shares/movies

You can then reference the auto.remote file from your auto.master:

/path/to/mount_point   /etc/auto.remote --timeout 60 --ghost