nfs again (nfs-automount)

[rshapiro@arris.com (Richard Shapiro)]

OK, my earlier messages were a little confused, so let me try again. 

Here's our situation: we have a bunch of machines running Unix, plus a
few lispms. Several of the Unix machines have file systems that they
export; all of the Unix machines are running automount. What this
means is that our Unix system administrators can shuffle file systems
to their heart's content, and all of the Unix machines can still find
the files they want in standardized places (via automount).

But the lispms are lost at sea in all of this, unless I hardwire all
the directories I need to work with, and rewire everytime the Unix
sysadm's rearrange things. This is clearly no good.

Since I can't mount foreign file systems onto my lispm (as far as I
know), what I would like to do is to go through a single, designated
Unix machine, and do all my file access using the standard paths on
that machine.  I understand that I can't use NFS directly from host1
(a lispm) to get files from host2 (a Unix host) that are actually
foreign file systems exported by host3 (another Unix host). But, if I
understand lispm nfs behavior correctly, this is not what it tries to
do. Instead, it's supposed to determine where the files *really* are,
and then do direct nfs to that host. In this case, when I ask for
host2:/foo/bar, the lispm should figure out that host2 has mounted
this directory from host3:/foo/bar, and then it should redirect the
file access to host3:/foo/bar. So I can always go through host2,
without worrying about the real physical location of the files in
question.  This would solve my problem, if it worked.

There seem to be two ways to get this behavior from the lispms. The
first thing I can do is to explicitly declare the foreign mounting via
NFS-REMOTE-FILESYSTEM properties on the namespace object for host2.
This works fine, but now I have to adjust the namespace everytime our
Unix adminstrators rearrange the file systems. Acceptable but clumsy. 

The second thing I can do is to put an NFS-AUTOMOUNT property on the
namespace object for host2. In theory, this does exactly what I want.
But, in fact, I can't get it to work. This, finally, is my problem.
Either I've misunderstood what NFS-AUTOMOUNT is supposed to do, or
else it just doesn't work as advertised.

Lispm system info: we're using UX1200s, running Genera 8.0.2, NFS
Client 415.3 (ECO level 1).

As usual, please send or cc replies to rshapiro@arris.com.

Thanks --

rs

ps: I'm still looking for ways to map CLOS classes to RPC types...