Auto-mounting NFS with autofs

There is a client-side service called autofs that acts as an auto-mount service for both local and remote filesystems. This works with a kernel module and the user space service; as you enter a directory, the mount is created automatically. The autofs package needs to be installed along with the nfs-utils package if NFS mounts are to be made. The auto-mounting feature can work with other remote filesystems, not just NFS. To install autofs, use the following command:

$ sudo yum install -y autofs

With this installed, the default behavior is to use the /net directory point for the network hosts. We can then access shares or exports on any host that we have access to, and enter a directory that matches the server name or IP address after the /net directory. We only need to create top level directories and do not need to create subdirectories. We can just change the directories to /net/192.168.10.10 and this directory will be created. Listing the contents of the...