From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Message-ID: <13426df10812011017y6b96a586k81e00b86e9e6a383@mail.gmail.com> Date: Mon, 1 Dec 2008 10:17:29 -0800 From: "ron minnich" To: "Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs" <9fans@9fans.net> In-Reply-To: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Disposition: inline References: <1FAD6133-18F8-444F-BD6E-795999DE3170@sun.com> Subject: Re: [9fans] How to implement a moral equivalent of automounter in Plan9? Topicbox-Message-UUID: 5520c40c-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Mon, Dec 1, 2008 at 9:48 AM, Russ Cox 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