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Managing Network File Systems in Oracle Solaris 11.1     Oracle Solaris 11.1 Information Library
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Document Information

Preface

1.  Managing Network File Systems (Overview)

What's New With the NFS Service

Significant Changes in This Release

Significant Changes in Earlier Releases

NFS Terminology

NFS Servers and Clients

NFS File Systems

About the NFS Service

About Autofs

Features of the NFS Service

NFS Version 2 Protocol

NFS Version 3 Protocol

NFS Version 4 Protocol

Controlling NFS Versions

NFS ACL Support

NFS Over TCP

NFS Over UDP

Overview of NFS Over RDMA

Network Lock Manager and NFS

NFS Large File Support

NFS Client Failover

Kerberos Support for the NFS Service

WebNFS Support

RPCSEC_GSS Security Flavor

Solaris 7 Extensions for NFS Mounting

Security Negotiation for the WebNFS Service

NFS Server Logging

Autofs Features

2.  Network File System Administration (Tasks)

3.  Accessing Network File Systems (Reference)

Index

About Autofs

File systems that are shared through the NFS service can be mounted by using automatic mounting. Autofs, a client-side service, is a file-system structure that provides automatic mounting. The autofs file system is initialized by automount, which is run automatically when a system is booted. The automount daemon, automountd, runs continuously, mounting and unmounting remote directories as necessary.

Whenever a client computer that is running automountd tries to access a remote file or remote directory, the daemon mounts the remote file system. This remote file system remains mounted for as long as needed. If the remote file system is not accessed for a certain period of time, the file system is automatically unmounted.

Mounting need not be done at boot time, and the user no longer has to know the superuser password to mount a directory. Users do not need to use the mount and umount commands. The autofs service mounts and unmounts file systems as required without any intervention by the user.

Mounting some file hierarchies with automountd does not exclude the possibility of mounting other hierarchies with mount. A diskless computer must mount / (root), /usr, and /usr/kvm through the mount command and the /etc/vfstab file.

Task Overview for Autofs Administration and How Autofs Works give more specific information about the autofs service.