Using automount to mount external files

First see the preceding section on NFS. To use automount you need to create one or more entries in the /etc/auto.master on each machine that requires automounted files. You can use the copyall script to copy configuration files to all compute hosts if you are setting up automount on these (not recommended). The format of the /etc/auto.master file is:

/users     /etc/auto.users   --timeout 60
/scratch  /etc/auto.scratch  --timeout 60

where the timeout option is the time in seconds before an idle file system is unmounted, /users, and /scratch are mount points and the files auto.home, auto.users etc contain the mount information similar to nfs /etc/fstab entries. E.g auto.users might have

# mount under /users  options           remote fs
nick                  -rw,soft,intr  nfsserver1:/fs/users/nick
joe                   -rw,soft,intr  nfsserver2:/users/joe

would cause nick and joe's files to be mounted under /users/nick and /users/joe respectively. See man autofs for details. autofs requires the autofs kernel module to be loaded.