Can Symbolics machines handle SUN automount directories?

[barmar@Think.COM (Barry Margolin)]

    Date: Thu, 17 May 90 18:17:10 PDT
    From: shirley@parc.xerox.com

    Does anyone know of a way to get Symbolics machines to handle SUN automount
    directories?  Has anyone else run into this issue and does anyone know whether
    Symbolics plans to support this in the future?  (I've got a question in to
    Symbolics software maintenance, but I figured I'd ask here too ....)

NFS version 11.35 handles Sun automounting reasonably well.  You have to
put NFS-AUTOMOUNT user properties on the Sun host objects in the
namespace, so that the Lispm will know what directories the Sun
automounts and from where (there's nothing in the protocol that allows
the Lispm to figure this out automatically); see the documentation for
details.  There are some automounter options that it doesn't handle,
though (I can't blame them too much -- they were undocumented until
SunOS 4.1).

    (Automount is a SUN facility that helps to provide seamless access to a large
    filesystem shared over many hosts.  This allows users to ignore some of the
    details about exactly where their files are stored, much like logical
    pathnames do.

This description is somethat misleading.  NFS by itself provides the
capabilities you describe.  The automounter is simply an NFS
optimization which permits remote file systems to be mounted at first
reference (as Symbolics has always done) rather than mounting all remote
file systems at boot time.

                                                barmar