Berkeley Automounter
| Developer(s) | Erez Zadok |
|---|---|
| Stable release | 6.1.5 / May 11, 2006 |
| Preview release | 6.2a2 / May 11, 2006 |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Type | 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.[1] 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, as well as the most flexible and 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 automounter mounts 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
- ↑ Jan-Simon Pendry (1989-12-01). "''Amd'' - An Automounter". Newsgroup: comp.unix.wizards. Retrieved 2007-12-23.
External links
- Am-utils Home Page (home of amd)
- RPMs from rpmfind.net