Berkeley Automounter

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am-utils
Developed by	Erez Zadok
Latest release	6.1.5 / May 11, 2006
Preview release	6.2a2 / May 11, 2006
OS	Cross-platform
Genre	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; it is, arguably, the most flexible and perhaps the most widely used.

[edit] 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 automount mount directories they are said to be owned by root until one uses them, at that time the correct owner of the directory shows up