Mount with automount (autofs)

Automagically mount remote directories on login.

Install the required pakages

sudo yum -y install autofs

Create the entry file

the mapper file is a file where we specify the directory where all our mounts should be placed.

This file should be stored in /etc/auto.master.d, note that the extension is required to be .autofs

for example: /etc/auto.master.d/home.autofs

/home/guests /etc/auto.home

The value for /home/guests is the file where we specify our mount options.

Note: Make sure the /home/guests directory exists, if not create it with:

mkdir /home/guests

Create the mapper file

We earlier specified where our map file should be stored (/etc/auto.home), create this file.

Say we want to auto mount the home directories stored on serverA on /home/guests/[USER] when [USER] logs in.

* -rw,sync serverA:/home/guests/&

• The wildcards task is to create the directory based on the users homedirectory on serverA (specified with &)
• We give option like: read/write and sync
• As last param we have to say where we want to mount to, again, the & is dynamic and maps to the logged in user.

Enable and start the service

sudo systemctl enable autofs
sudo systemctl start autofs

Wrapping up

Log in as a user, and check if the mount is present as expected.

df -h

Should output something like:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/xvda1      8.0G  5.6G  2.5G  70% /
devtmpfs        224M     0  224M   0% /dev
tmpfs           244M     0  244M   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           244M   41M  204M  17% /run
tmpfs           244M     0  244M   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs            49M     0   49M   0% /run/user/1000
tmpfs            49M     0   49M   0% /run/user/0
/serverA:/home/guests/user1       200M   0     200M 0% /home/guests/user1

Note the last line where we see that the mount is present