Re: disable direct mounts

[Ian Kent <raven@themaw.net>]

devnull@adc.idt.com wrote:
>>> We would like to continue to disable direct mounts. The other option is
>>> to use a different "auto.master" w/o the auto.direct, but we would like
>>> to avoid that.
>>
>> Why do you want to disable direct mounts?
> To solve our /usr/local issue.
> 
> Our NIS master is a Solaris box. We have an entry in auto.direct for
> /usr/local that currently points to our Sun Solaris binaries.
> The auto.direct is included in our auto.master
> 
> We are considering a move to autofs 5.x as part of our OS upgrade. We
> could create a separate auto.master.lnx that does not have auto.direct
> in it, but we prefer not to do that.
> 
> "Solving the /usr/local/ puzzle" as the NIS and NFS book suggests is
> something we can do, I am just not sure if we can do that right away.
> 
> So someway to disable auto.direct would be useful for us.

One thing you could do with v5 is to include a map that has a null map
entry for /usr/local.

For example, if you are using file maps on each machine you could do
something like this in auto.master:

/some/mount	/etc/some.map
....
+/etc/auto.master.null
/-	/etc/auto.map.with.usr.local
...

And /etc/auto.master.null would have"
/usr/local	-null

Or just add the null entry to the master map itself but then you need
multiple master map instances for each arch.

Note that plus map inclusion is allowed only in file maps and is
typically used to add local client map customisations when using a
centralized source of map information.

This obviously introduces possible problems with different versions of
autofs, and possibly with different distributions. For example there was
a recent bug in v5 where reading of the master map would stop if the
plus included map didn't exist. I'm not sure how version 4 will behave
with this either. However, I would expect other vendor autofs
implementations to work OK.

Ian