The autofs script distributed with RedHat (including 6.0, 6.1, and the 6.2betas) performas poorly in an NIS environment. The script, as written, will parse ONLY the local /etc/auto.master if it exists, and will ignore any auto.master in the NIS domain. This is counterintuitive, since the RedHat installer allows one to set up an NIS client without a lot of fuss. The result is a client system that has access to the NIS password map but is unable to mount user home directories without administrator intervention. One solution is the following simple patch, which simply changes the autofs rc logic to parse BOTH a local auto.master and a NIS auto.master map: # BEGIN PATCH --- autofs Sun Feb 20 16:36:25 2000 +++ autofs.fixed Sun Feb 20 16:37:18 2000 @@ -95,3 +95,4 @@ ) -else +#else +fi @@ -121,3 +122,3 @@ fi -fi +#fi } ## END PATCH This will generally work as expected in an NIS environment. A better solution might be to fix the autofs script so that it understands the "+mapname" format used under SunOS which allows one to include specific NIS maps from the local auto.master. For example, the default /etc/auto.master might look something like this: /misc /etc/auto.misc --timeout 60 +auto.master And allows considerably more flexibility than the patch included above. I have written a version of the autofs rc script that handles this syntax and will submit it if there is interest.
A lot the feedback that we have gotten tells us that thsi is counter intuitive. See bug #6208. A lot of people feel differently about this and there is no simple way to satuisfy them all short of reqorking the whole rc script from scratch. And we try to stay as close as possible to the original sources so that our behavior (no matter how broken some might think it is) resembles the one on other Linux distros.