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THIS CHAPTER DESCRIBES HOW TO SET UP THE AUTOMOUNTER ON A NETWORK THAT IS running NIS+ on SunOS 5.x systems and NIS on SunOS 4.x systems. If you need help setting up NIS+, refer to All About Administering NIS+ by Rick Ramsey. (See the bibliography at the end of this book.)
A system that is an NFS server shares one or more of its file systems over the network. A server keeps a list of currently exported file systems and their access restrictions (such as read-write or read-only). You can share a resource by adding an entry to the /etc/dfs/dfstab (distributed file system table) on the server and then typing shareall. See the dfstab(4) and the share(1M) manual pages for more information.
You do not need to perform any additional steps on the NFS server to make the shared file systems available to the automounter.
Client systems that use the automounter need to have the default auto_master and auto_home maps in their local /etc directory. These default files are included in the system software installation. You should not need to edit these default files.
If you have problems with automounting from a system, check to make sure that it has the default auto_master and auto_home maps and that they are in the /etc directory. If the maps are there, check to make sure that the auto_master map contains the +auto_master entry and that the auto_home map contains the +auto_home entry. These entries tell the automounter to use the NIS+ automounter maps. If the entries are not present, the automounter uses only the information from the local /etc automount maps.
The following sections describe how to use the -o and the -v options to the niscat command to display information about the format and the content of NIS+ automount maps. You do not need to be root or be a member of the sysadmin group (GID 14) to display information using the niscat command. You do need to have at least read permission for the NIS+ automount tables. See Chapter 5, "Introducing the NIS+ Environment" for more information about NIS+. For complete information about how to set up and administer NIS+, refer to All About Administering NIS+, which is referenced earlier in this chapter.
Information used by NIS+ is stored in tables on the NIS+ root master server. Copies of these tables are stored on NIS+ replica servers. The automount maps are instances of NIS+ tables. You can display the format of any existing NIS+ automount map by using the niscat -o command. The format shows information about the NIS+ table; its ownership and permissions; and the names, attributes, and access rights of each column. Use the niscat -o command for information such as the permissions for the map and the names of the columns.
The syntax of the niscat -o command is the following:
niscat -o table-name.directory.domain-name.
For NIS+ automount tables, the more specific syntax is the following:
niscat -o auto_name.org_dir.domain-name.
NOTE: NIS+ tables require a fully qualified domain name--the name of the map, the directory where the map is stored (org_dir), and the domain name, which must be followed by a dot (.). If you omit the trailing dot, a syntax error is displayed. If the NIS_PATH environment variable is set, then you do not have to specify the complete path to the org_dir directory. You can type table-name.directory (with no trailing dot) and press Return. The examples in this book use the fully qualified domain name. See Part 2 for more information about NIS+.
Format information about the NIS+ auto_home map in the sun.COM. domain is displayed in the following example:
oak% niscat -o auto_home.org_dir.sun.COM.
Object Name : auto_home
Owner : oak.sun.COM.
Group : admin.sun.COM
Domain : org_dir.sun.COM.
Access Rights : ----rmcdrmcdr---
Time to Live : 12:Ø:Ø
Object Type : TABLE
Table Type : automount_map
Number of Columns : 2
Character Separator :
Search Path :
Columns :
[Ø] Name : key
Attributes : (SEARCHABLE, TEXTUAL DATA, CASE SENSITIVE)
Access Rights : ----------------
[1] Name : value
Attributes : (TEXTUAL DATA)
Access Rights : ----------------
oak%
See Part 2 for more information on NIS+ security and on how to interpret that information.
You can display the content (or value) of any existing NIS+ automount map's columns by using the niscat -v command. Use this command when you want to determine the values set for an automount map or to verify that an entry has been created successfully.
The syntax of the niscat -v command is as follows:
niscat -v table-name.directory.domain-name.
For NIS+ automount tables, the more specific syntax is the following:
niscat -v auto_name.org_dir.domain-name.
In the following example, the NIS+ auto_home map for the domain sun.COM. contains only one entry; the user winsor automounts a home directory from oak: /export/home/winsor.
oak% niscat -v auto_home.org_dir.sun.COM. winsor oak:/export/home/winsor oak%
NOTE: The niscat command displays the values for the NIS+ table you specify as the argument to the command. The output lists the file systems that can be mounted but does not indicate whether the file systems are mounted.
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