On Sunday 06 January 2008, Stroller wrote: > Hi there, > > I was on #gentoo yesterday asking about autofs & someone recommended > ivman instead. > Which does gentoo-users think I should use?
Dilemmas like this are best resolved by finding out what problem a technology was designed to solve. A good example of the kind of problem autofs solves is exporting home directories on a large server that has many accounts, used in conjunction with NFS and NIS, and anyone can log in from any workstation at any time. This scenario is common - think thin clients Say you have 100 accounts and user joe logs onto the network. You *could* export /home to his workstation, but that exposes everyone else's homedir as well. With autofs you essentially tell the server that this is user joe, it exports his home dir on the fly, creates a directory /home/joe on his workstation (/home must already exist)and mounts the NFS export there. Now, you don't appear to be doing something like that :-) You can do many wonderful things with autofs, but it often involves complex hacks and workarounds, which is the impetus for other solutions to be developed, like ivman. -- Alan McKinnon alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
