autofs

[happybunny]

the autofs feature is one of the coolest options in linux.

the autofs system will automatically mount filesystems (local or remote) when a user or application tries to access any data in the mount path.

Then, after a set time of idle'ness, autofs will unmount the filesystem freeing up those resources.

After installing autofs using your distro's package manager, simply edit these files:

/etc/auto.master

/mnt/software /etc/auto.misc --timeout=120

the /mnt directory must exist
/mnt/software will be magically created for you, so you should NOT create it.
the /etc/auto.misc entry can actually be any "map" file, but /etc/auto.misc is the default map.
the --timeout value is how long (in seconds) the mount should be idle before it is unmounted.
also note, that if /mnt/software does exist, any current folders or data will be inaccessible while autofs is running.

/etc/auto.misc

linuxsoft          -fstype=nfs     linuxsoft:/software

linuxsoft is the name of the local mount point where the file system will show up, underneath the path from auto.master.
In this example, /mnt/software/linuxsoft

-fstype is the type of filesystem (ftp, ext3, nfs, etc).

The last column is where the filesystem is, in this example it is a server called linuxsoft and a "share" of software. It is not necesarry that the location and server name be the same as in this example.


I set this up on the linux servers to automatically mount a common network share where all of our config files and software is stored. So from any linux machine, I can access a single repository of data by simply cd'ing into /mnt/software/linuxsoft.

This configuration helps us keep our software versions aligned and to not have local (and out of date) copies of software on each host.

Another feature I configured was to also allow that same share to be accessed via a Samba share to all the Windows machines. This makes it very easy to share files back and forth from linux and Windows.

but I'll leave that for another post!

[gehidore]

I think I like this, thanks for posting it!