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Do you love the combination of elegance and power offered by OS X? Are you a unix-afficionado turned mac-evangelist, telling all your friends that OS X is the OS? Are you trying to use your mac in an existing *nix-based networking environment? If so, I'm willing to bet that you're frustrated by the lack of support for NFS-based automount capabilities in OS X. Since this issue is obviously not a priority for Apple, I've taken matters into my own hands and produced a "hack" that is not pretty, but gets the job done.

The problem

You have an existing network of *nix computers, with thousands of network shares managed by Sun-style NFS servers. You would like your mac to access these resources using the automounter to mount available network shares on demand. You have read the Apple 'automount' man page and discovered that the automount command that ships with OS X does not handle Sun-style automount maps.

The solution

When I was faced with this problem a few years ago, I wrote osx_automount. These scripts are available as open source software under the MIT License. They work for us here at TSRI. I've tried to make them fairly flexible, but they might require custom modification to meet your needs.

Get the software

[Update: 25-Jul-2006]

I've been busy enough over the last few months not to notice the error messages in my log files regarding failed attempts to download the tar file for this software. My apologies to those of you who are itching to try out these scripts. I fixed the links, and you can now download the software:

osx_automount version 0.5.1

[Update: 18-May-2007]

Version 0.5.1 changes the format of the auto_master file to match the output of ypcat -k auto.master. Thanks to Howard Moftich for pointing out this bug.

Overview of the automount scripts

NFS automount startup is controlled by the StartupItem script /System/Library/StartupItems/NFS/NFS. This script starts nfsd,mountd and automount. The osx_automount script is a wrapper that controls only automount. By separating the control logic for automount, this script provides a convenient command-line interface for controlling multiple automount processes.

osx_automount

The master control script. osx_automount handles starting, stopping, restarting and updating automount processes.

automap2applemap

A python script that converts Sun-style NFS maps to flat-file maps formatted for use with Apple automount. This script retrieves maps via 'ypcat' and has optional parameters for excluding mount points based on the server name or the directory name. In addition, this script adds rw, resvport, soft, and intr options for each mount point. This is currently not configurable, but it should be trivial to add an optional switch for this functionality if you need it.

Installation

Installation is trivial, but not automated. If you're not comfortable working in a unix shell, then ask Google for help, or find someone to help you. First, untar the archive in /etc to create /etc/automount. Next, edit the file /etc/automount/auto_master to include the table of automount maps and map points for your network setup. If you want everything, you should be able to get the latest auto.master file with this command:

$ cd /etc
$ sudo tar xzvf /path/to/osx_automount.tar.gz
$ sudo ypcat -k auto.master >! /etc/automount/auto_master

You can start the automount processes now using the script:

$ sudo killall automount
$ sudo /etc/automount/osx_automount start

Automount on startup

To make the automounter startup on boot, you need to modify the startup script that controls NFS startup. Make a backup copy of /System/Library/StartupItems/NFS/NFS and then edit the file, and find the automount section:

/System/Library/StartupItems/NFS/NFS

## 
# Start the automounter
##

if [ "${AUTOMOUNT:=-YES-}" = "-YES-" ]; then
    automount -m /Network -nsl -mnt ${AUTOMOUNTDIR}
    ln -s /automount/Library /Network/Library 
    automount -m /automount/Servers -fstab \
        -mnt /private/Network/Servers \
        -m /automount/static -static -mnt ${AUTOMOUNTDIR}
    ln -s /automount/Servers /Network/Servers

    # 
    # Hint that the name /Network should be localized:
    #
    ln -s . /Network/.localized
fi

Delete or comment-out everything inside the 'if' statement, and replace it with a call to osx_automount. Note that the osx_automount script will start the standard automount processes to provide the Network/Servers browser functionality.

modified /System/Library/StartupItems/NFS/NFS

if [ "${AUTOMOUNT:=-YES-}" = "-YES-" ]; then
    if [ -f /etc/automount/osx_automount ]; then
        # BRC: starting osx_automount
        /etc/automount/osx_automount start
    fi
fi