Trisha Shetty (Editor)

Berkeley Automounter

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Developer(s)
  
Erez Zadok

Preview release
  
6.2a2 / May 11, 2006

Type
  
NFS Automounter

Stable release
  
6.1.5 / May 11, 2006

Operating system
  
Cross-platform

License
  
BSD License

The Berkeley Automounter (or amd) first appeared in 4.4BSD, and is a computer automounter daemon. The original Berkeley automounter was created by Jan-Simon Pendry in 1989 and was donated to Berkeley. After languishing for a few years, the maintainership was picked up by Erez Zadok, who has maintained it since 1993.

The am-utils package which comprises amd is included with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. It is also included with a vast number of Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core, ASPLinux, Trustix, Mandriva, and others.

The Berkeley automounter has a large number of contributors, including several who worked on the original automounter with Jan-Simon Pendry.

It is one of the oldest and more portable automounters available today, as well as the most flexible and the most widely used.

Caveats

There are a few "side effects" that come with files that are mounted using automounter. These may differ depending on how the service was configured

  • Access time of automounted directories is set to the time automounter was used to mount them (after the directories are accessed, this statistic obviously changes).
  • On some systems, directories are not visible until the first time they are used. This means commands such as ls will fail.
  • If mounted directories are not used for a period of time, directories are unmounted.
  • When automounter mounts directories, they are said to be owned by root until one uses them, at that time the correct owner of the directory shows up.

    • References

    Berkeley Automounter Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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