Automating File Sharing

Chapter 19
 Chapter Goals
• Understand how to automount file systems
under Windows.
• Understand how to create a consistent name
space.
• Understand NFS automounter setup.
• Understand automounter map files.
 Automating File Sharing
• Windows has nothing really comparable to automount that will
automatically mount remote disks on demand.
• However, Windows shares can be configured to automatically
mount when a user logs in.
• The configuration begins by right clicking on the “Network
Neighborhood” or “Network Places” icon and selecting “Map
Network Drive” from the pop-up menu.
• Selecting “Map Network Drive” will bring up a dialog box, where
a drive letter is selected and assigned to a share.
 Automating File Sharing
• This dialog includes three items to pay careful attention to.
1. The “Browse…” button. This allows a user to browse using an interface
similar to the “Network Neighborhood” to locate the server and share. This
is often easier than entering the share name directly into the “Folder” field.
2. The “Reconnect” checkbox. This is how the automatic mount of the sharing
is set. Checking this box results in the drive mapping being saved and
automatically performed next time the user logs in.
3. The “different user name” link. This link allows the user to enter an
username and password different from the username and password used
when they logged into the Windows system as shown in Figure 19-?. This
is important for sites that use different authentication methods for Windows
and UNIX and still wish to offer Samba shares to Windows users. Note that
on login, a share that has a different user name and password will cause the
automatic remounting process to prompt the user for the differing password
at the point the mount is reconnected.
 Automating File Sharing
• While this automatic mounting of shares is handy it does
not address the basic problem of file sharing, server
unavailability.
– If the server the share is being mounted from fails, the network
drive connection will be lost and must be manually remounted.
– If the server is unavailable when the user logs in, the network
drive will not be mounted even if the server later becomes
available.
– If a server fails, but another server offers the same services,
manual intervention will be required to mount the backup
server.
– The UNIX automount service offers ways around these
problems.
 Automating File Sharing
• As mentioned in Chapter 18, “Network File Sharing,”
growing networks present the system manager with
many challenges.
– As new machines are added, correctly maintaining the
configuration files to export and mount the newly added file
systems becomes an increasingly daunting chore.
– In addition, when a file server becomes unavailable, processes
on client workstations may stop even if they do not depend on
that file server.
– The automount service was developed to minimize these
problems on UNIX systems.
Automating File Sharing
Automating File Sharing
 Automating File Sharing
• The default mappings used by the automounter are often
difficult for users to handle:
– /tmp_mnt/servername/filesystem_name/user_dir
– /net/servername/filesystem_name/user_dir
– /home/servername/filesystem_name/user_dir
• The system administrator needs to force the automounter to
provide a consistent name space for the user’s directories.
 Automating File Sharing
• What you want the system to do is map a file
system from the server to an alternate mount
point on the client
 Automating File Sharing
– The automounter allows filesystems to be
mounted on demand.
• The administrator sets up some control files, and
makes some mount point directories.
• If/when a user references an a filesystem that is set
up for the automounter, the NFS software looks it up
in the files, and mounts the filesystem.
– The control files are called “map files”.
• There are several types of map files.
• The most common map files are:
 Automating File Sharing
• Master Maps - list all direct and indirect map
files to be processed.
# Master map for automount daemon
/- auto_direct -ro
/remote auto_indirect
/home auto_home
 Automating File Sharing
• direct maps –
• lists of filesystems that do not share a
common mount point.
• /usr/man
• /opt
• /cs/tools
# mount /usr/man from grissom
/usr/man -ro grissom:/usr/man
# mount framemaker binaries from grissom or chaffee
/usr/frame -ro grissom:/usr/frame \
chaffee:/usr/frame2.0
 Automating File Sharing
• indirect maps
• In an indirect map, the NFS file systems referred to by
the map are mounted at a different mount point than the
one listed in the table and a symbolic link is made from
that location to the directory listed in the master map.
• This allows for some more exotic automount tricks.
# Item in RHS is mounted in location of LHS
# mount /src from snow /usr/local/src
src snowwhite:/usr/local/src
bin snowwhite:/usr/local/bin
gnu snowwhite:/usr/local/gnu
 Automating File Sharing
• auto_home
• One of the most common indirect maps is auto_home.
• The auto_home map has keys in the /home directory.
• It is used to collect users’ home directories into a single location, and greatly
eases the task of maintaining home directory location information.
dwight glenn:/export/home/&
frank chaffee:/user2/&
tom grissom:/export/users/&
steve glenn:/export/home/&

Note how the line starting with the key frank does not contain a full path.
The key in an indirect map specifies the name of the symbolic link to be made in the
directory specified in the entry for the map in the auto_master file.
In this case, all the keys in the auto_home map will create symbolic links in the
/home directory.
 Automating File Sharing
• Automounter Variables
– Variable - Meaning - Example
– ARCH - CPU architecture type - sun4
– CPU - CPU type - SPARC
– HOST - Host name - glenn
– OSNAME - Operating system name - SunOS
– OSREL - Operating system release number - 5.6
– OSVERS - Operating system version - FCS1.0
 Automating File Sharing
– Once all of the maps are set up, and the
mount points have been created, you start the
Solaris automount daemon with:
• /etc/init.d/nfs.client start
• /etc/init.d/autofs start
– Automount can also be configured to mount
the filesystem from the server that responds
first! (Fault Tolerance)
 Automating File Sharing
• AMD automounter is a more robust system, but takes more
work to set up initially (because it is an add-in product).
– The amd automounter, found on Linux and many BSD style UNIX
variants uses a different and incompatible format for its map files.
– The general concepts are the same, keyed entries that specify remote
filesystems to be mounted, however the syntax is richer and offers
greater control over how the map behaves in differing circumstances.
• The analog to the auto_master file for the amd automounter is the
amd.conf file found in /etc.
• Beyond specifying the other maps to be consulted, amd.conf also
includes a general stanza that allows the many option settings of amd to
be configured.  
#
# amd default config file
#
# GLOBAL OPTIONS SECTION
[ global ]
normalize_hostnames = no
print_pid = yes
pid_file = /var/run/amd.pid
restart_mounts = yes
auto_dir = /.automount
#log_file = /var/log/amd
log_file = syslog
log_options = all
#debug_options = all
plock = no
selectors_on_default = yes
print_version = no
# set map_type to "nis" for NIS maps, or comment it out to search for all
# types
map_type = file
search_path = /etc
browsable_dirs = yes
show_statfs_entries = no
fully_qualified_hosts = no
cache_duration = 3600
local_domain = bio.purdue.edu
# Bio map
[ /bio ]
map_name = /etc/bio.amd
# PUCC map
[ /pucc ]
map_name = /etc/pucc.amd
# CS map
[ /cs ]
map_name = /etc/cs.amd
 Automating File Sharing
• As stated in the comment at the top of the amd.conf file, the many
options listed are described in the manual page.
• Note that the option keys and their assocated values are case
sensitive.
• Here are a few of the key options that may need to be changed to
adapt the default amd behavior for a particular site.
– normalize_hostnames: Setting this option to yes will cause amd
to re-write any hostnames into their fully qualified form before
using them as parameters in map files. This is not always
desirable as it makes for long entries in map files for local hosts.
– log_file: This specifies the location of the log file amd writes
messages to. Or, as shown here, the log_file option can be set to
“syslog” to have amd log via the syslog service.
 Automating File Sharing
– map_type: This option takes several values allowing for a wide
variety of sourcs for map information. Here the “file” option is
used. Other choices include hesiod, ldap, ndbm, nis, nisplus,
passwd and union. The passwd option allows for the direct
creation of an auto_home style user home directory map from the
the password file.
– browsable_dirs: By setting this to yes, the keys in a given map
are made available for viewing by commands such as “ls”. This
prevents amd from mounting all the referenced file systems for
simple directory lookups; a big performance savings. Note that
commands that stat each directory entry such as “ls –l” will still
cause amd to mount the referenced file systems.
– cache_duration: This specifies the time an unused file system
will remain mounted.
 Automating File Sharing
• An amd map file uses a syntax that involves a key and
series of values format. The key is the entry that will appear
in the amd “file system”.
• The series of values describes the file system(s) or other
items referenced by the key and their options.
• The series of values can contain conditional statements as
well as file system references.
 Automating File Sharing
# global default
/defaults
type:=nfs;opts:=rw,intr,hard,nosuid,grpid,quota,vers=2,proto=udp
# replicated local program servers
MISC rhost:=mutant;rfs:=/usr/mutant3/local \
rhost:=turtle;rfs:=/usr/turtle2/local
# UNIX filesystems
alaska host!=alaska;rhost:=alaska;rfs:=/home \
host==alaska;type:=link;fs:=/home
alu host!=alu;rhost:=alu;rfs:=/usr/alu \
host==alu;type:=link;fs:=/usr/alu
 Summary

• Windows allows automatic file system mounting.