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 file systems as necessary.
Whenever a client system that is running automountd
tries to access
a remote file system, 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, it is automatically unmounted.
Mounting is not required 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 systems with the automountd
command
does not exclude the possibility of mounting other systems with the
mount
command. A diskless computer must
mount /
(root) and /usr
through the
mount
command and the /etc/vfstab
file.
For more information about the autofs
service, see: