mount_autofs

[Tim Gustafson]

Hi,

I see that in /usr/src there are some things related to mount_autofs, but none of this is compiled or installed during the buildworld/buildkernel process.  If I build mount_autofs by hand:

cd /usr/src/sbin/mount_autofs
make
make install

I get a binary that runs, but always complains:

mount: Operation not supported by device

Our network has a huge existing user base (thousands of computers and thousands of users) that are on Mac client, Linux clients, Linux servers and SunOS servers that all use autofs automount maps distributed via LDAP.  I'm pushing hard for us to start using FreeBSD for some things, but the lack of an automounter that is compatible with the maps that we're already distributing for these other OSs is a show-stopper.

Making a static copy of the mount maps for FreeBSD use is not going to work (for one thing, the maps change too frequently, and anyhow there are thousands of mount points and we don't want them all mounted on our BSD boxes all of the time) and I tried to get AMD to work using exec maps but found it to be incredibly unstable (and in fact AMD locked up my machine several times during the course of experimentation, requiring an actual power cycle to get the system responding again).

I had a chat with Alfred Perlstein who worked on some autofs-compatible stuff back in about 2004 for FreeBSD that was dropped because of pressure by Apple.  He thinks that the current Apple autofs might be licensed under the ASPL but doesn't have the bandwidth to do any work on porting that to FreeBSD.  Unfortunately, my C skills are not up to snuff, so I'm in no place to port anything anywhere, so I was wondering if anyone else on the list had any interest in autofs for FreeBSD that might be a bit more fluent in C than I am?

Tim Gustafson
Baskin School of Engineering
UC Santa Cruz
tjg at soe.ucsc.edu
831-459-5354