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Subject : Re: LUG: Symbolic link for AFS directory

From : "Mark T. Voelker" <markvoelker@fast-mail.[redacted]>

Date : Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:24:39 -0400

Parent


> about linking to an unmounted file-system. Again, symbolic links do
> not automatically mount the file-system they link to.

Very true, but if you want to create that effect you can do so using
autofs. That is, you can get a filesystem automatically mounted
on-demand (e.g. whenever you try to access it) without mounting it
yourself--and for that matter even have it unmounted automatically after
some period of inactivity so you don't consume
bandwidth/cpu/memory/whatever for a filesystem you're not actively
using. I personally have never attempted to use it with FUSE/sshfs, but
I use it heavily with NFS and the like.

http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Automount.html

There are some sshfs+autofs centric howtos available via Google. Once
autofs is set up, you can treat the directory where it's configured to
mount the volume just the same as any permanently-mounted directory--so
doing things like symlinking to it work fine (whether it's currently
mounted at the time or not). E.g. if I set up autofs to mount it
on /misc/myhomedir, then do something like:

ln -s /misc/myhomedir /tmp/test

At this point if I do "ls /tmp/test" then autofs will mount the
filesystem (assuming it isn't already mounted) and show me it's
contents.

At Your Service,

--
Mark T. Voelker

On Sat, 2010-03-13 at 16:04 -0500, Daniel Underwood wrote:
> This webpage <http://www.umbc.edu/oit/webdev/alias.html> doesn't talk
> about linking to an unmounted file-system. Again, symbolic links do not
> automatically mount the file-system they link to. You'll need to use
> something like SSHFS or SFTP, and then you may use a symbolic link
> (after making the connection).



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