Re: [9fans] How to implement a moral equivalent of automounter in Plan9?

["ron minnich" <rminnich@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Russ Cox <rsc@swtch.com> wrote:
> 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,

The other reason for an automounter was the observed unreliability of
nfs servers. The automounter reduced the phone calls sysads got about
"what is this NFS server that's not responding, why am I still trying,
since I don't even use it?" The goal was to aggressively unmount
whenever possible, so as to minimize the vulneratbility of desktops to
unreliable servers.

But this need for an automounter has not really existed for probably
17 years or so ... NFS servers are pretty reliable in many cases. It
is interesting to see the use case for automoiuters change.

Now I could swear that about 5 years ago somebody posted an
automounter for plan 9 on this list. It was tiny.

ron