Why does automounter create a virtual filesystem?

[Viktor Dukhovni]

flee at shire.cs.psu.edu (Felix Lee) writes:

>If automounter crashes, or you kill -9 automount, you're truly hosed.
>...
>/net never has anything but (virtual) symbolic links.  Is there any
>reason that automount has to fake /net?  Why doesn't automount create
>real symbolic links in a real /net directory?

The automounter is an NFS server,  it has to intercept refernces through
/net in order to mount filesystems on demand, the sysmlinks are no more
virtual than any sysmlink on an NFS mounted file system,  if the server
goes away references through the link will hang!

The right way to dispose of the automounter is *always* kill -TERM (or
simply kill).  This is the signal sent by the system during a shutdown.
On receipt of a SIGTERM,  the automounter will attempt to unmount all the
filsystems it mounted,  then will unmount itself (exposing the underlying
directory).  Any further references through the mount point will not hang,
since the kernel will no longer attempt to find the autmomounter.  However
the symlinks (which were never on any disk,  but only in the automounters
memory!) will not be there,  you can create them by hand if desirable.

	Viktor Dukhovni <viktor%math at princeton.edu>	: ARPA
		<...!uunet!princeton!math!viktor>	: UUCP
	Fine Hall, Washington Rd., Princeton, NJ 08544  : US-Post
		+1-(609)-258-5792		 	: VOICE