Autofs: can you mount only certain home dirs?

Question

Does autofs take completed control of directories mentioned in auto.master? The examples with /home show that you can specify individual users instead of * and &, but even then it seems to take over the whole /home level so you can't see or add local subdirs.

I have a small group of users/hosts where I would like to at least temporarily mix/match who is automounted or not.

Answer 1

I am not sure what you are asking, but automounts are only mounted when you try to access them. I created symlinks to a separate folder (once I access a mount) so when I try to open symlink autofs mounts it for a given amount of time.

path from auto.server: /autofsmounts/server/ folder that will be created: extra symlink (created after "ls /autofsmounts/server/extra"): /server/extra -> /autofsmounts/server/extra

ls /server/extra will mount the server:extra for x seconds (--timeout x ).

If you place symlinks where you need them, you can have consistent path accessible from file managers. Maybe you can apply access limitations on a symlink (location) or something?

Comments

What I want is to automount /home/user1 from a different server when user1 logs in (to any of sereral other servers), but leave the local copy of /home/user2 accessible. It looks like this is possible using the 'direct' /- syntax in auto.master but not by specifying /home and then only mentioning specific users in the auto.home file. In the latter case, only the subdirectories mentioned are automounted, but you can't access any local subdirectories under /home.

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If I'm not mistaken, the direct method should work for what you are aiming at.

For example, you have the following line in /etc/auto.master:
/- /etc/auto.direct

Then /etc/auto.direct has :
/home/user1

You can create a local directory /home/user2 in addition to /home/user1 . The latter will be automounted but the former is your local directory.