Here’s what /etc/automounts/foo looks like: Because I’m working outside the user space, I’ll need root/admin privileges. To do this, I need to create three files inside a new /etc/automounts directory called foo, bar, and baz containing the respective automount maps. I want these shares to mount inside /groups/foo, /groups/bar, and /groups/baz. Each of these directories contains at least two subfolders which are the actual shares. Let’s say my Isilon cluster is called and it is exporting a number of NFS shares with root paths beginning with /ifs/groups/foo, /ifs/groups/bar, and /ifs/groups/baz. My solution (which works with OS 10.6 through 10.8) adds entries to /etc/auto_master that reference files in a new /etc/automounts directory. Because of a peculiarity in OS X Lion’s Finder ( that I’ll discuss later), this goal precluded the use of the automount maps that our linux hosts get from LDAP. My primary goals for this NFS automounting solution was to make it easy to manage and update - we sometimes add and remove fileshares - and to have the Macs mount fileshares at exactly the same paths as in Linux, inside a root-level directory called ‘groups’. Automount is clearly the best solution going forward. Simply by navigating to where the share is supposed to be will mount it there. Another benefit of autofs is that users no longer have to mount shares manually. Autofs will automatically mount fileshares on an as-needed basis and will automatically disconnect fileshares after an idle timeout period (which defaults to one hour). Fortunately, there’s a way around this that all our linux computers already use: autofs. At a certain point, this will become a problem. The more Macs we convert to LDAP/NFS, the more active connections we’ll have to our fileservers. Once a Mac user’s account has been migrated to LDAP, s/he can use NFS URLs in the Finder’s Connect to Server window and will see vastly superior performance to the previous SMB connections. Because our Mac users have mobile accounts with local homes, the move requires a bit of finagling, which is why Rich scripted the process. To remedy this, with the help of my colleague and Mac admin, Rich Trouton, we’ve started to migrate certain Mac users away from AD and SMB to LDAP and NFS. As the size of the scientific datasets people use grow, the (lack of) performance of SMB in Mac OS X becomes more of an issue - especially for people who know they can get far better performance in Windows and Linux. Our Macs bind to AD and therefore use SMB to access fileshares. The majority of our fileshares are located on Isilon gear and are accessible over SMB with AD authentication, and over NFS with LDAP authentication. I work in a mixed Mac/Windows/Linux environment.
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