autofs ~/.hidden: No such file or directory

Question

I am mounting home drives using autofs from a file server:

auto.master

/home   /etc/auto.home

auto.home

*   tyrell:/nfshome/

This seems to work great, but on the file server, tyrell I'm constantly getting this error:

Apr 27 13:38:08 tyrell rpc.mountd[1145]: authenticated mount request from 192.168.1.164:691 for /nfshome/.hidden (/nfshome) 
Apr 27 13:38:08 tyrell rpc.mountd[1145]: can't stat exported dir /nfshome/.hidden: No such file or directory

Why is it looking for a .hidden folder and how can I get the client to stop trying to mount it?

The clients are running Ubuntu 16.04 with Unity Desktop.

Answer 1

This seems to be a problem for people going back to 2004, and which has recently been re-addressed March 2017. It is due to "user-friendly" tools like Nautilus seeking to implement a hidden files feature. To do this it looks for a file called .hidden at the top of a filesystem for a list of filenames to hide. This causes autofs to try to mount this file from your server. (There is similar code in glib to implement the same feature).

Perhaps you can try revising the * map in your /etc/auto.home to be less encompassing. Or if you configure your desktop to not ignore hidden files, pehaps it will not look for the magic file. I'm not able to try any working solutions for the moment.