computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, ...

the Berkeley Automounter (or amd) is a computer

automounter An automounter is any program or software facility which automatically mounts filesystems in response to access operations by user programs. An automounter system utility (daemon under Unix), when notified of file and directory access attempts und ...

daemon Daimon or Daemon (Ancient Greek: , "god", "godlike", "power", "fate") originally referred to a lesser deity or guiding spirit such as the daimons of ancient Greek religion and mythology and of later Hellenistic religion and philosophy. The wo ...

which first appeared in

4.4BSD The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s. 1BSD (PDP-11) The earliest distributions of Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s included the source code to the operating system, allowing researchers at universities to modify an ...

in 1994. The original Berkeley automounter was created by Jan-Simon Pendry in 1989 and was donated to Berkeley. After languishing for a few years, the maintenance was picked up by Erez Zadok, who has maintained it since 1993. The am-utils package which comprises and is included with

FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular ...

NetBSD NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). It was the first open-source BSD descendant officially released after 386BSD was forked. It continues to be actively developed and is a ...

, and

OpenBSD OpenBSD is a security-focused operating system, security-focused, free and open-source, Unix-like operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD). Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by fork (software development), forking N ...

. It is also included with a vast number of

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

distributions, including

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a Commercial software, commercial Open-source software, open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commerce, commercial market. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is released in server versions for x86-6 ...

Fedora Core Fedora Linux is a Linux distribution developed by the Fedora Project. Fedora contains software distributed under various free and open-source licenses and aims to be on the leading edge of open-source technologies. Fedora is the upstream source ...

, ASPLinux,

Trustix Trustix Secure Linux was a Linux distribution intended for use on servers and focused on security and stability. It was a hardened and secure OS, meaning that non-essential services and binaries are not installed, while UNIX staples like Sendmail ...

Mandriva Mandriva S.A. was a public software company specializing in Linux and open-source software. Its corporate headquarters was in Paris, and it had development centers in Metz, France and Curitiba, Brazil. Mandriva, S.A. was the developer and mainta ...

, and others. The Berkeley automounter has a large number of contributors, including several who worked on the original automounter with Jan-Simon Pendry. It is one of the oldest and more portable automounters available today, as well as the most flexible and the most widely used.

Caveats

There are a few "side effects" that come with files that are mounted using automounter, these may differ depending on how the service was configured. * Access time of automounted directories is initially set to the time automounter was used to mount them, however after the directories are accessed, this statistic changes. * On some systems, directories are not visible until the first time they are used. This means commands such as ''ls'' will fail. * If mounted directories are not used for a period of time, directories are unmounted. * When automounter mounts directories, they are said to be owned by ''root'' until someone uses them, at that time the correct owner of the directory shows up.

References

External links

Am-utils Home Page
(home of amd)
RPMs
fro
rpmfind.net
Unix network-related software {{unix-stub