fstab
files on Unix systems). Automounter utilities address these challenges and allow sysadmins to consolidate and centralize the associations of mountpoints (directory names) to the exports. When done properly, users can transparently access files and directories as if all of their workstations and other nodes attach to a single enterprise-wide filesystem./home/user
. This allows users to access their own files from anywhere in the enterprise, which is extremely useful in UNIX environments, where users may frequently invoke commands on many remote systems via various job-dispatching commands such as ssh
, telnet
, rsh
or rlogin
, or via the X11 or VNC protocols./net/hostname/nfspath
where hostname
is the host name of the remote machine and nfspath
is the path that is exported over NFS on the remote machine. This notation generally frees the system manager from having to manage each exported path explicitly via a central automounter map.depot:/export/linux
and depot:/export/solaris
respectively. Thereunder they might have directories for each of the OS versions that they support. Using the dynamic variation features in their automounter, they might then configure all their systems so that any administrator on any machine in their enterprise could access available software updates under /software/updates
. A user on a Solaris system would find the Solaris compiled packages under /software
, while a Linux user would find RPMs, DEBs, or other packages for their particular OS version thereunder. Moreover, a Solaris user on a SPARC workstation would have his /software/updates
mapped to an appropriate export for that system's architecture, while a Solaris user on an x86 PC would transparently find his /software/updates
directory containing packages suited to his system. Some software (written in scripting languages such as Perl or Python) can be installed and/or run on any supported platform without porting, recompilation or re-packaging of any sort. A systems administrator might conceivably locate such software in a /software/common
export.autofs
, which communicates with a user-mode daemon that performs mounts.[2][3] Other Unix-like systems have adopted that implementation of the automounter - including AIX, HP-UX, and Mac OS X 10.5 and later.diskarbitrationd
carries out this form of automatic mounting. In FreeBSD, the removable media can be handled by the automounter, just as network shares are.[8][9]|1=
(help)