Very Computer

I'm trying to determine whether we should be
using automounter.

We have 3 Sun servers making about 15 file systems
available.  They run Sol 7,8, and 9.  Most of the
data is on the Sol 8 box.

We have about a dozen Linux servers.  They are
in varying stages of install / decay.  PIIIs to
dual Xeons.  RedHat 7 mostly, with a few RH AS.
Very little local disk.  Used mostly for Perl
computing to the files / databases on the Sun
boxen.

We have pretty stable back-end file systems, ie:
no new disk packs coming in too often, very little
reallocaton of disk, etc.  Total disk is about 7TB.

We started recently using automounter to have the
Linux system automount the Sun disks.  Things
occasionally break.  Sometimes human error in the
maps, sometimes we don't know why.

Automounter seems to stop working, jobs fail, users
unhappy, customers pissed.

Is this an appropriate use of automount?  We are
much more concerned about stability than we are
maintaining 15 mounts in /etc/fstab.  I'm leaning to
killing it, but would like feedback from people who
know more about it than me.

So:  Feedback please?

My 2cents is:
For solaris to solaris automounting makes sense and works
very easy provided the systems are patched.

Also I have had very good success with solaris and HP-UX
automounting, both directions, althougth there is some minor
systax difference in the config files.

OTOH, solaris to Linux has always been problematic for me.
When it flakes out I can never determine why, it just seems
to break sporatically.  I tried liunx updates and patches, but
if you have different Linux distributons and different versions
of Linux it becomes a big hazzel very quickly.

Especally when NFS mounting works so darn easy!  If you have the
network bandwidth don't waste the time debugging all the automounters
-- it just takes too darn long!

--
http://ftp.opensysmon.com is a shell script archive site with an
open source system monitoring and network monitoring software package.
Many platforms are supplied already compiled.