21.3.3. autofs Common Tasks
21.3.3.1. Overriding or augmenting site configuration files
It can be useful to override site defaults for a specific mount point on a client system. For example, assuming that the automounter maps are stored in NIS and the
/etc/nsswitch.conf
file has the following directive:
automount: files nis
and the NIS
auto.master
map file contains the following:
/home auto.home
Also assume the NIS
auto.home
map contains the following:
beth fileserver.example.com:/export/home/beth joe fileserver.example.com:/export/home/joe * fileserver.example.com:/export/home/&
and the file map
/etc/auto.home
does not exist.
For the above example, lets assume that the client system needs to mount home directories from a different server. In this case, the client will need to use the following
/etc/auto.master
map:
/home /etc/auto.home2 +auto.master
And the
/etc/auto.home2
map contains the entry:
* labserver.example.com:/export/home/&
Because only the first occurrence of a mount point is processed,
/home
will contain the contents of /etc/auto.home2
instead of the NIS auto.home
map.
Alternatively, if you just want to augment the site-wide
auto.home
map with a few entries, create a /etc/auto.home
file map, and in it put your new entries and at the end, include the NIS auto.home map. Then the /etc/auto.home
file map might look similar to:
mydir someserver:/export/mydir +auto.home
Given the NIS
auto.home
map listed above, an ls
of /home
would now give:
~]$ ls /home
beth joe mydir
This last example works as expected because
autofs
knows not to include the contents of a file map of the same name as the one it is reading and so moves on to the next map source in the nsswitch
configuration.