The Autofs Automounter

Prior to the introduction of the automounter in 1987, NFS mounts were administered separately on each workstation. The automounter has provided administrators with a tool to construct a filesystem namespace that can be shared across an organization. While the automounter is widely used, its success has been tempered by problems inherent in its implementation. This paper describes a new implementation of the automounter based on a new filesystem. This new automounter not only fixes the problems, but provides some interesting opportunities for future development.