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Introduction
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An "automounter" maintains a cache of mounted filesystems.
Filesystems are mounted on demand when they are first referenced, and
unmounted after a period of inactivity.
Amd may be used as a replacement for Sun's automounter. The choice
of which filesystem to mount can be controlled dynamically with
"selectors". Selectors allow decisions of the form "hostname is THIS,"
or "architecture is not THAT." Selectors may be combined arbitrarily.
Amd also supports a variety of filesystem types, including NFS, UFS and
the novel "program" filesystem. The combination of selectors and
multiple filesystem types allows identical configuration files to be
used on all machines so reducing the administrative overhead.
Amd ensures that it will not hang if a remote server goes down.
Moreover, Amd can determine when a remote server has become
inaccessible and then mount replacement filesystems as and when they
become available.
Amd contains no proprietary source code and has been ported to
numerous flavours of Unix.
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