MacOS – NFS mounts without automounter, which seems to grab everything

automountmacosnfs

We have some NFS mounts we place in the fstab, via "vifs" which we want to manage separate of the autofs subsystem. The mounts were created in a separate location (/mnt) which should not be managed by the automounting system. But it appears that no matter where you place a mount, somehow the autofs/automount subsystem grabs ahold of it and tries to remount it when you unmount it.

This is a big problem and I'm trying very hard to figure out why and how to fix it. I wonder if there is a flag in the /etc/auto* files that might have to do with this? Something else?

Does someone know how to get around this annoying behavior.

Thanks!

Best Answer

I'm not sure if this will help you. If all your looking to do is save the connection information, finder will solve that problem. http://support.apple.com/kb/TA22243 Just add it your list of favorite servers and it's point and click. The information appears to be outdated, but I'm sure the process is still similar.

I just checked and there is another way to mount NFS shares:

$cd /net/"ip or computer name"

and browse the shares.

You can easily write a script to do this for you. I can confirm that the above method does work, because I tested it in Lion, and I read about this technique in a book I think is based on Tiger/Leopard.

EDIT: Here is an output of my /etc/auto_master file

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master        # Use directory service
/net            -hosts      -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid
/home           auto_home   -nobrowse,hidefromfinder
/Network/Servers    -fstab
/-          -static

I'm guessing you would delete the last two lines according to the manual. [Disclaimer: I have never tried this]. Here is a link the auto_master documentation.

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/man5/auto_master.5.html

EDIT: http://lowendmac.com/ed/winston/09kw/intro-to-autofs.html Here it describes the last two entries

The last two lines in auto_master handle NFS mounts defined in the /etc/fstab file, the common file system mount table in Linux and other Unix flavors. The /etc/fstab file is deprecated in OS X and not recommended. I would try commenting them out one at a time and see if that helps

Related Question