Problems with automount

[Guy Harris]

>I created a map in /etc/automount.map that contained:
>	/var/tmp/cyrus -o soft,bg pprg:/home/hi/cyrus
>and started automount:
>	automount /var/tmp /etc/automount.map

Try

	cyrus -soft,bg pprg:/home/hi/cyrus

instead.  There are two errors with the map file entry you set up:

1) The man page says the first token is supposed to be the "name of a
subdirectory within the directory specified in the automount command line
(not a relative pathname)"; this is somewhat confusing at best, and
inaccurate at worst.  It *is* supposed to be a relative pathname, in the
sense that it's relative to the mount point upon which the automounter
mounts itself.  (I think I've seen this problem with the man page stated
somewhere else.)

2) In addition, the "mount options" portion is not supposed to contain a
"-o"; it's supposed to be preceded with a "-" (since the mount options are
optional, it needs to be able to distinguish mount options from a
specification of a directory to mount).

>After starting automount, ANY command directed at /var/tmp hangs.

I wasn't able to reproduce that either with your original file (although
using a newly-created directory, rather than "/var/tmp") or with the "-o
soft,bg" replaced with "-soft,bg".  It just refused to recognize "/<mount
point>/cyrus"; it didn't hang. 

Note that mounting the automounter on "/var/tmp" is NOT a good idea (I
presume you did that only as a test); that's why I used a different
directory.  It's like mounting an NFS file system on there (literally -
the automounter is just an NFS server running in user mode), except that
the file system in question doesn't let you create anything on it
(attempts to do so cause EROFS to be returned).  Many UNIX programs tend
to get rather upset when told "/usr/tmp" is on a read-only file system....