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From: komarnit@tramp.Colorado.EDU (KOMARNITSKY ALEK O)
Subject: Re: Does HP-UX 8.0 have an NFS automounter?
Message-ID: <1991May2.232654.10698@colorado.edu>
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Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
References: <1991May1.112644.20929@doug.cae.wisc.edu>
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Date: Thu, 2 May 1991 23:26:54 GMT
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In article <1991May1.112644.20929@doug.cae.wisc.edu> tannenba@engr.wisc.edu (Todd Tannenbaum) writes:
>Hi,
>
>I do not yet have HP-UX 8.0, and was wondering if HP-UX 8.0
>includes an NFS automounter (i.e. dynamic NFS mounting on demand).
>
>The only NFS automounter for HP-UX that I am currently aware of
>is a public domain (i think) program called AMD, and I have heard
>that AMD has lots of bugs and other assorted strangeness.  Thus,
>I am hoping HP includes an automounter in 8.0.....
>
>Does anyone who already has 8.0 know one way or another?

Umm. We use AMD in our multi-vendor (Sun, HP, Ultrix, SGI, AIX)
environment and it works great - I don't know how we would get by
without it. It even seems to handle system crashes on both the
client and server side fairly well.

There is one (minor(?)) problem with the current release when 
an NFS server is exporting multiple file systems. AMD will mount
all of the exported file systems, and then after a timeout period, will
attempt to clean up and umount un-used file systems (leaving, of course,
the one that you are using). However, when you go to reference one of
the file systems that has been umounted, AMD doesn't remount it and 
you're left with empty space (well, actually you have an empty directory
that's the mount point on the server). However, the author has informed
me that this is fixed in the next release - I believe he has a Beta
release available on ucb.edu.

I should say that we don't use the more "exotic" features of the automounter,
but it works fine for our simple needs: /nfs/hostname/...
By the way, one fix (spell that k-l-u-d-g-e) to the above problem is to add a
few lines to one of the RC files on the client side that "busies up" the 
filesystems from servers that export more than one.

alek, Dumb MBA Student, University of Colorado

P.S. I'd also like to know if HP plans on including this in 8.x ?!?