The automounter is symptomatic of an ill that Plan 9 has cured. Since adding to the name space requires no special privileges, ordinary users can mount the servers they want to use directly, instead of needing a privileged daemon to guess their intent and mount servers on demand. In Plan 9, scripts that care to use a particular server simply put "9fs server" in their script.
One could write a user-level server that interposes on exportfs, and if it sees a failed walk of "name" in the root, runs "9fs name" and resends the walk, but that could only work for a single user: in general, mounting requires authentication, so hiding the mounting requires hiding the authentication. This is easy if you're only worried about one user--just use that user's factotum--but not really possible when there are multiple users involved. In that case, automatic mounting takes control of authentication away from the users. Russ
