Re: [gentoo-user] Autofs or ivman?

[Stroller]

Sorry for taking so long to reply to this - I've been kinda busy with  
work the last few days.


On 6 Jan 2008, at 17:25, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> On Sunday 06 January 2008, Stroller wrote:
>> Hi there,
>>
>> I was on #gentoo yesterday asking about autofs & someone recommended
>> ivman instead.
>> Which does gentoo-users think I should use?
>
> Dilemmas like this are best resolved by finding out what problem a
> technology was designed to solve.
>
> A good example of the kind of problem autofs solves is exporting home
> directories on a large server that has many accounts...
>
> ... With autofs you essentially tell the server
> that this is user joe, it exports his home dir on the fly, creates a
> directory /home/joe on his workstation (/home must already exist)and
> mounts the NFS export there.
>
> Now, you don't appear to be doing something like that :-)

Many thanks for your reply - it was quite insightful. In fact, autofs  
would be quite useful for my /mnt/video/[a...z] volumes.

It makes me still wonder, however, why so many people seem to use  
autofs for /mnt/floppy, /mnt/cdrom &c, tho'!

> ... the impetus for other solutions
> to be developed, like ivman.

My concern over ivman - which looks ideal for much of what I want to  
do - is that it's not clear if it's maintained. For network mounting / 
usr/portage I guess I can just use NFS and just stick the mount in  
the clients' /etc/fstab, but ivman looks great for automounting  
portable media. As I said in my original posting [1], the state of  
ivman looks to be in a bit of a mess and I'm kinda reluctant to mess  
about with it if it's going to be obsolete in a year or two - someone  
please persuade me this isn't going to happen!!   ;)

Stroller.


[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.user/192551 
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