linux automount using nis maps from solaris

I am trying to get the linux automount (3.1.7) to accept the (NIS) maps that
our solaris systems use. The autofs script causes things like:
/usr/sbin/automount /work yp auto.work -ro,soft
to be executed. This looks right to me, but the automount program complains
"parse(sun): unknown option" and proceds to mount the entries in auto.work
for read/write instead of readonly. Otherwise thinks seem to be okay.

Why is automount choaking on "-ro,soft"? I have searched the web but cant
find anywhere where this is addressed... and the man page for automount is
not to helpful.

It seems implausable that linux's automount cant handle somehting this
simple... after all it can handle these same options when they are part of
an entry in the indirect map (auto.work in my case)... so it would be simple
to apply the options to all of the entries in the map... trival... It seem
to me that automount cant be that dumb... so I must be the one who is being
dumb... What am I doing wrong?

Here are the to maps:

#auto_master
/work auto.work -ro,soft

# auto_work
dev1 hostg:/t5s6/dev1
dev2 hostg:/t5s7/dev2

anon <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
>
> #auto_master
> /work auto.work -ro,soft
>
> # auto_work
> dev1 hostg:/t5s6/dev1
> dev2 hostg:/t5s7/dev2

Perhaps you should put mount options into auto.work map, not into auto.master.

--
andrei

On Wed, 29 Sep 2004 22:58:39 -0400, anon wrote:
> I am trying to get the linux automount (3.1.7) to accept the (NIS) maps that
> our solaris systems use. The autofs script causes things like:
> /usr/sbin/automount /work yp auto.work -ro,soft
> to be executed. This looks right to me, but the automount program complains
> "parse(sun): unknown option" and proceds to mount the entries in auto.work
> for read/write instead of readonly. Otherwise thinks seem to be okay.
>
> Why is automount choaking on "-ro,soft"? I have searched the web but cant
> find anywhere where this is addressed... and the man page for automount is
> not to helpful.
>
> It seems implausable that linux's automount cant handle somehting this
> simple... after all it can handle these same options when they are part of
> an entry in the indirect map (auto.work in my case)... so it would be simple
> to apply the options to all of the entries in the map... trival... It seem
> to me that automount cant be that dumb... so I must be the one who is being
> dumb... What am I doing wrong?
>
> Here are the to maps:
>
> #auto_master
> /work auto.work -ro,soft
>
> # auto_work
> dev1 hostg:/t5s6/dev1
> dev2 hostg:/t5s7/dev2

Hmm, I had a lot of problems trying to get Linux to mount direct maps a
couple of years ago. I ended up giving up, when I came across some
documentation that clearly stated that Linux autofs does NOT handle direct
maps. I can't remember that version (but I think it may have been in SuSE
7.2?) I ended up translating these mounts to virtual user /home/*
directories. Yeah, that smells, but it worked for me. I got angry. Sigh.

Relatively recently (like earlier this year?) someone pointed out that for
(SuSE?) Linux (version 8.2?) there are actually 2 versions of autofs
provided: the default version 3.x and the optional version 4.x. My
understanding was that (at least at that time) the 3.x version of autofs
was known not to handle direct maps, but only indirect maps (gotta have
/home directories, or it's not much use, right?). This person told me that
he had managed to get direct mounts to work (with Sun Solaris NFS servers,
too), by substituting the optional 4.x autofs for the default installation
3.x autofs. Maybe that is related to your problem, too?

Which Linux distro are you using? What version? You say you are using
autofs-3.1.7. Do you have (optional) an autofs-4.x in the distro?

I have upgraded my desktop PCs to SuSE 9.1, but haven't had time to retest
those allegations. I expect I'll get to it soon, but maybe not soon enough
for you. I also would like to have automounter direct maps work correctly.

p.s. I don't know what the big deal is with direct maps? Why are they
(substantially?) different in the Linux implementation from indirect (like
/home/*) maps? Is this an intentional functional restriction? Is it a
performance issue? Was this a (serious?) bug? Mysterious, and annoying.

--
Juhan Leemet
Logicognosis, Inc.

Juhan Leemet <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> On Wed, 29 Sep 2004 22:58:39 -0400, anon wrote:
>> Here are the to maps:
>>
>> #auto_master
>> /work auto.work -ro,soft
>>
>> # auto_work
>> dev1 hostg:/t5s6/dev1
>> dev2 hostg:/t5s7/dev2
>
> p.s. I don't know what the big deal is with direct maps? Why are they
> (substantially?) different in the Linux implementation from indirect (like
> /home/*) maps? Is this an intentional functional restriction? Is it a
> performance issue? Was this a (serious?) bug? Mysterious, and annoying.

OP was using indirect map, which is perfectly supported.

--
andrei

AI > Perhaps you should put mount options into auto.work map, not into
auto.master.

The maps are already out there... This would mean changing all of them and
having to apply the options to each entry within each map in order to work
around the "flaw" I found in Linux. Not very nice, but probably would work.

By the way. the 3.1.7 automount I was running (RH 7.3) apparently had a
defect in the autofs startup script that caused it to reject a valid syntax.
It can easily be fixed by modifying the script to eat the "-". It looks
like the writers of automount goofed as to what the syntax for the map
qualifiers are... getting rid of the "-" (according to the man page) changes
the context of the options from be "a map option" to being "a mount
option"... but automount applies the "mount options" to every entry in the
map which seems to have the desired map option effect. Seems to me to be a
really weird screw-up... but then again the sun man page leave unspecified
whether the map options to there automount command are supposed to have a
"-" dash infront of them or not... but all of sun's examples show that they
do.

I took a look at the 4.x version that is part of Fedora Core 2 and it has
fix the behavior (but you have to enable the fix by setting configuration
symbol... sorry, I forgot the name and where it is to be set). Once this is
done the automount, happily

By the way, I also had problem with the silly (Linux 3.1.7) automount
interpreting things like
foo -ftype=autofs bar
as saying to look for the map as a file called bar even though the
nsswitch.conf file was set up as "automount: nis". This would mean that I
would have to have too different maps: one for Solaris that was as written
above and one for Linux that read "foo -ftype=autofs yp:bar". This is yet
another incompatibility between linux's automount and the specification it
clames to be a subset of (things that are incompatible are not a
sub-set!!!).

But again checking Fedora, I found that this problem had been fixed as well.
Whoever it is maintaining automount for Linux is doing a bang up job fixing
the screw-up that crept into the earlier versions!



"anon" <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote in message
news:yDK6d.3698$ek.920@okepread03...
> I am trying to get the linux automount (3.1.7) to accept the (NIS) maps
that
> our solaris systems use. The autofs script causes things like:
> /usr/sbin/automount /work yp auto.work -ro,soft
> to be executed. This looks right to me, but the automount program
complains
> "parse(sun): unknown option" and proceds to mount the entries in auto.work
> for read/write instead of readonly. Otherwise thinks seem to be okay.
>
> Why is automount choaking on "-ro,soft"? I have searched the web but cant
> find anywhere where this is addressed... and the man page for automount is
> not to helpful.
>
> It seems implausable that linux's automount cant handle somehting this
> simple... after all it can handle these same options when they are part of
> an entry in the indirect map (auto.work in my case)... so it would be
simple
> to apply the options to all of the entries in the map... trival... It seem
> to me that automount cant be that dumb... so I must be the one who is
being
> dumb... What am I doing wrong?
>
> Here are the to maps:
>
> #auto_master
> /work auto.work -ro,soft
>
> # auto_work
> dev1 hostg:/t5s6/dev1
> dev2 hostg:/t5s7/dev2
>
>
>