Using automount and File System Org under NFS

[datacube.com!berger at gaia]

[[ Followups were directed at comp.unix.wizards, but I think answers would
be appropriate for this group as well.  --wnl ]]

It looks to me that the automount capability that comes with SunOS 4.0 is
THE way to organize and control the mounting of stuff across an NFS
environment. Here is what I'm planning to do, tell me if I'm crazy or if
there is a better way and if there are answers to the questions that I
have:

Use the /etc/fstab of each diskful system to just mount the actual drives
that are physically controlled by each CPU (ie don't have any nfs mounts
in any of the server or client's /etc/fstab):

	/dev/sd0a / 4.2 rw 1 1
	/dev/sd0g /usr 4.2 rw 1 2
	/dev/sd0h /home 4.2 rw 1 3
	/dev/sd0f /var 4.2 rw 1 4
	/dev/sd0e /export/swap 4.2 rw 1 5
	/dev/sd0d /export/root 4.2 rw 1 6

I can then have a generic dynamic mounting of all the server's exported
file systems by having all servers and clients execute the following
command in their rc.local:
	automount /net -hosts

Then have all the home directories mounted in /homes by using the
following automount command on each computer:
	automount /homes -passwd

Now the manual page for automount says that the passwd entries must be
in the form of:
	/dir/server/username

I am not yet clear how to set this up. I have the following questions:
	- Where does the actual physical home directory live?
	- Is that different than what is in the passwd entry?
	- Is "/dir" magical or should it be the dir (first argument, /homes)
	  of the automount command?

I've tried several combinations and can not make it work.

Finally I want to use a yellow pages map as kind of a network wide
/etc/fstab for mounting shared files and packages at particular mount
points. Things like /usr/lib/news, news spoolers, mail spoolers, emacs
lib, sources, man pages, homes of various tools (framemaker, CASE, etc) to
be mounted in nice places like /usr or /usr/local on all machines, but
they may actually live at some arbitrary path on arbitrary servers. I
figure for some critical packages I can have a few servers and use the
feature of automount where you can give it a list of servers and it will
mount the one that responds first. This would give the network a bit of
fault tolerance.

Now the automount man page says this can be done by making a yellow pages
map. Its not clear what the source format should be and exactly how to
install it as a yellow pages map.

Any tips, suggestions, experiences? The only documentation I can find on
this is the man page for automount!

Please email replies, I will summarize.

	Bob Berger 

Datacube Inc. Systems / Software Group	4 Dearborn Rd. Peabody, Ma 01960
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