Comments on: Mac OS-X Snow Leopard breaks NIS Automount

By: Harald Fricke

Harald Fricke — Tue, 18 May 2010 11:41:19 +0000

Well, in 10.6.3 everything works for me as expected (e.g. as in 10.5.x). I followed the steps in http://www.jeff.com/2009/mac-os-x-server-as-a-nis-client-with-automount/ to set up the NIS binding. Now the default /etc/auto_master pulls auto.master from NIS, no need to change “_” to a “.” in the maps.

By: Thomas A. Fine

Thomas A. Fine — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:35:34 +0000

I swear this was working for me in 10.6.1 (with auto_master not auto.master, I’ve never had to change “_” to a “.”, even though the actual NIS map is with a dot). But in 10.6.2 I’m definitely seeing this as broken.

I had it in mind to just do it the hard way and replicate the data in auto.master in local files. So I created the relevant entries in /etc/auto_master. But I did NOT create the actual local files with the redirects to the specific NIS maps. For some reason I restarted autofs in this mid-state, and IT WORKED.

What this tells me is that it is correctly trying to get data from the auto.master map, but it is not using this to create the mount points for the automounter. So
the dummy lines create the mount points and the master map fills in the data. Still sucks, but it points to where the bug lies.

Related to this, I’ve noticed that browsing of automount points, which worked under leopard, is not working for me under snow leopard.

On the upside, in 10.6.2 it looks like replicated mount points are finally handled correctly (of at least in some way that functions, whether it is correct or not).

tom

By: Jakub Krajcovic

Jakub Krajcovic — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 22:29:55 +0000

Spot on! I noticed this exact same problem with Snow Leopard client, and this is going to be a huge problem for us… Our company relies heavily on the automounter functionality and not using auto.master is frankly not an option.

I’m talking to Apple Australia to see if we can do something about this, and if not, we’re sticking with 10.5…

By: Ben Davis

Ben Davis — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:28:14 +0000

Thanks for the post. Same problem here. Upgraded last week and now my direct maps stopped working. Instead of being able to just reference the master map I had to make a copy of it. So instead of /etc/auto_master looking like this:

+auto_master

It now looks like this:

/hosts -hosts -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
/home /etc/auto_home -nobrowse,hidefromfinder
/- /etc/auto_direct

And the automounter works like it used to.