Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

This is my first time dealing with AIX, so I beg patience. :-) We have all our RHEL machines set up such that they will mount any NFS directory from any other server when a user tries to go to it. (So it's configured to put everything under /net, and when a user goes to /net/servername, it mounts the exports from servername automatically.) I can see the exports from the other servers if I do 'showmount -e <servername>', and I can manually mount the directories with no problem. I'm seeing a lot about creating an auto_master file to automount, but that only seems to automate the process of mounting a hard coded list of directories, not a dynamic one. Any thoughts?

Thank you!
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

no big difference between rhel and aix: read the docs on autoFS and automount
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Well, there's certainly at least one difference - I don't have to create or configure the auto.master in RHEL. It happens automatically. I've never touched anything in RHEL to get this to work...
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Originally posted by: flodstrom

There's a sample "auto_master" file in /usr/samples/nfs/. In that file you'll have correct syntax for using the special hosts map.

Like this for example.

/net -hosts -nosuid

Also remember to run a "automount -v" (-v is only for verbose output...) after updating the auto_master file.
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

That seems to be a very similar file to what I have in RHEL, so I moved it into /etc. However, when I run automount -v I get:
automount: no mounts
automount: no umounts

And if I try to ls in /net it just hangs. The thing is, the hosts file does only have itself and the loopback addy in it (which is the same case as the RHEL machines). So if that's what it's looking at to generate the map file, then there's nothing there to get. Is there a way to get it to work without having to manually add the other machines anywhere?

Thanks!
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Ah - I think I might have found something. In RHEL I do make a few tweaks to the nsswitch.conf, one of which is setting hosts to files, then dns. I'm guessing I might have to do something similar, although there's no nsswitch.conf. Perhaps netsvc.conf? Looks similar.

goes to play
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

Yes...that was it! So, for reference of anyone else who might see this, I had to edit /etc/netsvc.conf and add the line:

hosts = local, bind

This meant that when autofs was using the hosts map to create its list, that map included hosts from both the local hosts file and from dns. At least, that's what I'm assuming is going on. ;-)

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
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