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The Autofs Automounter


Brent Callaghan and Satinder Singh
SunSoft Inc.

Abstract

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.


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