Interoperability Between automount Implementations?

vinay asks: "We are trying to integrate our Sun Solaris machines with new Linux servers. One major issue we currently have is to have a single set of automount files that will work for both environments. After going through all of the HOWTOs and the FAQs for Linux automount, we were troubled to see that Linux automount has a very basic feature set, and isn't very compatible with Solaris automount." Might it be possible for Linux to emulate the missing features offered in Solaris automount via expert use of short scripts?

"We are primarily interested in how to take care of '/-' key and variable substitution. Currently, one can call a map like:

 /-  auto.direct mount-options

and in auto.direct can have entry like

 /project1  -some_options FileServer:/projects/project1

Now this map will not work for Linux. The best one can do is mount the projects tree as /linux/projects and make some softlinks. However, this becomes very messy as the number of machines grows (and this is only for one directory path).

It's the same thing with all of the software we have installed, we can mount the Linux software in a different tree, but in that case all startup files (.cshrc, .bash_profile, etc) will have to different for each OS (or some other messy workarounds). The way I would prefer to handle this is to install Solaris software in /software/SunOS, and Linux in /software/Linux and mount them via variable substitution in the automount file:

 /software -options  FileServer:/software/$OSNAME

This way users will have a single startup file and they will only mount the binaries of their current OS in exactly same path.

Also, Linux automount recommends that you avoid mounting in the root directory area, but the automount from other vendors don't seem to have this limitation, and make use of the '/-' key."

While, I'm all for compatibility, it's not unreasonable to expect programs like "automount" to vary between implementations. Has anyone figured out a work around for this situation that isn't so "messy"? Would preprocessing the automount options file right before invocation be possible, in this case? And are there plans to make Linux automount more compatible with some of the options available to the Solaris version?

Comments

Use amd

[joekrahn]

Linux autofs is missing many, many features, such as being able to specify multiple redundant servers for one mount point. I use amd, packaged in am-utils. It has almost everything you need, but no direct maps (I think it's a Linux limitation: the automounter has to take the whole directory, not just entries in it).

You can simulate this by having a real mount point, like /nfs, then putting symbolic links in root, such as /shares -> /nfs/shares. Of course, you then have to maintain those links.

You still may need different map formats. For total compatibility, you might have to make executable maps that read and reformat the real maps. I gave in and just keep two sets of maps, one for Linux and one for IRIX.

Home directory mounts have not been a problem, and I still use autofs for those, becuase it's a bit faster.