automount vs mount

automount vs mount

[Luca Ferrari]

Hi to everyone,
I've got a classic NIS+NFS situation:  a NIS server which contains all 
accounts and which exports the users' home thru NFS. When the user logs-in 
from a client (I've about 40 clients) the home is mounted thru automount, so 
that only that user's home is mounted. 
Now, due to a confiuration problem on one of all clients, I was unable to run 
automount, so that I mounted the whole home tree statically, of course thru 
NFS.
This opens a doubt in my head: is automount always convenient? I mean, is 
really so convenient to mount a single home instead of  a whole tree? I 
believe that for a single user it is so, but imagine that more than one user 
can access the same client at the same time (maybe thru ssh). In this case I 
will have more mounts (with automount) while with the statical mount I will 
have always one. What is the threshold beyond which automount is no more 
convenient?
I'm asking this because I'm not really expert of automount internals, and I'm 
trying to understand to better configure my machines.

Thanks,
Luca

-- 
Luca Ferrari,
fluca1978@virgilio.it

Re: automount vs mount

[Christopher Slater]

A static mount would work fine here, I'd think.  The advantage of
automounting is mostly convenience and the fact that if you have lots
of clients hitting an NFS export, it will only be mounted by the ones
who need it at any given time.

If your running a server with lots of people logging in, then chances
are someone will always want their home directory at any given time, so
automounter won't ever time out.  Seems more practical to use a static
mount in that situation, since you would assume resources are used
every time an automatic mount is done.

Not sure if this helps or not...

Chris


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