Red Hat Knowledgebase

Release found: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4

Solution:

Multi-mount entries allow the user to specify a directory hierarchy that will be mounted on the system.

For example, In auto.home, enter the following autofs multimount entry.

<SERVERNAME> -rw,hard,intr /[server] -ro nfsserver.com:/[path] \
/data nfsserver.com:/data \
/home nfsserver.com:/home

Substitute the required SERVERNAME and in the /etc/auto.master file, append the line:

/net /etc/auto.home --timeout=60

After restarting autofs, mount the multimount using the key <SERVERNAME>

Test it by running the command:

ls /net/servername

or

cd /net/servername

In this example, note that the multiple NFS share from the server are mounted under the directory /net/servername, like:

ls /net/servername
[server] usr home

This example demonstrates how to cobble together a single directory structure from multiple servers. One point to note here is that the "servername" directory contains both an NFS-mounted file system, and mount points beneath it. Currently, when any directory in this hierarchy is accessed, the automount daemon mounts every entry in the directory hierarchy. The expiry of a multimount entry also happens atomically. This is the mechanism used to implement -hosts. The program map auto.net generates multi-mount entries on the fly and the daemon mounts them when /net/<SERVERNAME> is accessed. The <SERVERNAME> is used as the key. For more information please refer to the autofs(5) man page:

$ man 5 autofs