Berkeley Automounter

Infobox_Software | name = am-utils



caption =
developer = Erez Zadok
latest_release_version = [ftp://ftp.am-utils.org/pub/am-utils/am-utils-6.1.5.tar.gz 6.1.5]
latest_release_date = May 11 2006
latest_preview_version = [ftp://ftp.am-utils.org/pub/am-utils/am-utils-6.2a2.tar.gz 6.2a2]
latest_preview_date = May 11 2006
operating_system = Cross-platform
genre = NFS Automounter
license = BSD License
website = http://www.am-utils.org/

The Berkeley Automounter (or amd) first appeared in 4.4BSD, and is a computer automounter daemon. The original Berkeley automounter was created by Jan-Simon Pendry in 1989 and was donated to Berkeley. [cite newsgroup
title = "Amd" - An Automounter
author = Jan-Simon Pendry
date = 1989-12-01
newsgroup = comp.unix.wizards
url = http://groups.google.com/group/comp.protocols.nfs/msg/4951e03d27b7c7e2
accessdate = 2007-12-23] After languishing for a few years, the maintainership was picked up by Erez Zadok, who has maintained it since 1993.

The am-utils package which comprises amd is included with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. It is also included with a vast number of Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core, ASPLinux, Trustix, Mandriva, and others.

The Berkeley automounter has a large number of contributors, including several who worked on the original automounter with Jan-Simon Pendry.

It is one of the oldest and more portable automounters available today; it is, arguably, the most flexible and perhaps the most widely used.

Caveats

There are a few "side effects" that come with files that are mounted using automounter. These may differ depending on how the service was configured

* Access time of automounted directories is set to the time automounter was used to mount them (after the directories are accessed, this statistic obviously changes)
* On some systems directories are not visible until the first time they are used. This means commands such as "ls" will fail
* If mounted directories are not used for a period of time, directories are unmounted
* When automount mount directories they are said to be owned by "root" until one uses them, at that time the correct owner of the directory shows up

References

External links

* [http://www.am-utils.org Am-utils Home Page] (home of amd)
* [http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=am-utils&submit=Search+...&system=&arch= RPMs] from [http://rpmfind.net rpmfind.net]