[NCLUG] autofs behaviour

[Stephen Warren]

On Fri, July 11, 2008 9:29 am, Michael Coffman wrote:
>
> I have a question about the behaviour of autofs.  It seems like it is
> very easy to hit a situation where autofs will unmount a file system
> and an active process will lose access to a file and fail to read it.
>...
>When I run the following simple test:
>
>    date;while [[ -r /net/hostname/test ]]; do :; done; date
>
> command output:
>    Fri Jul 11 09:02:46 MDT 2008
>    Fri Jul 11 09:03:59 MDT 2008
>...
> As you can see, I lose read access typically shortly after the mount is
> supposed to time out.

While the above test does keep touching the filesystem, there is no
persistent process that actually maintains an open file/directory-handle
within the mounted tree.

I'd guess that if you "cd /net/hostname" then run your test, it'll work
fine for arbitrary periods of time.

Now, why the path isn't automatically and transparenly remounted the first
time it's touched after the timeout, I have no idea, not being familiar
with autofs at all.