Drive mounting using autofs daemon

[Kihara Muriithi]

Hi all,
  I am seeking some assistance please. I have been trying to
understand autofs and I think I am missing something vital. The
mounting actually works, but I can't seem to figure how it works and
that is what is frustrating.
 I started by visiting /etc/auto.master file and enabled the line below
/misc  /etc/auto.misc --timeout=60
Commented out the line below
#/misc /etc/auto.misc

Saved that changes and headed to /etc/auto.misc
According to documentation, everything there look set for automount.
The line related to CD is cool and the floppy can be mounted by
querying the file /etc/filesystems. Neat, I am just about to see
autofs in action.

Head over to /misc and try to list dir available there. Of cause, I
have already inserted a floppy and a CD at their respective drives.
#ls /misc
A second later, another
#ls /misc
  Nothing mounted. What the heck is wrong? How are these damn drive
mounted? I hypothesis may be autofs don't work if you are using
/etc/fstab simultaneously. Lets see if there is change
#vi /etc/fstab
Ah, something odd, the drives are "managed". What the heck does that
mean? I ask myself. Me head for firefox and a second later, google
pull out an article that say something to do with hal inserting those
lines automatically. That mean commenting them out is useless, hal
will just insert another pair of line right below the commented line.
Further reading, and I can't think of ways to force fedora 4 use
autofs in a transparent way. That mean I have a black box and if I
need to fix a broken automount I would have no clue how to go about
it. How the heck does automount work these days?

William
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