autofs4 comes standard with Ubuntu. I decided to try autofs5 because it would bring us the ability to have direct maps for mounting all NFS filesystems. I set up an auto.direct that was really quite similar to our SunOS days. Since we don't really call much in /cse/local during system startup, I decided to move everything, even the mount of /cse/local to a direct map. I ran into a few problems. First, since /cs/local/share isn't mounted yet when autofs start (because autofs is responsible for mounting it), the indirect maps for mounting user home directories/research space weren't available. If only autofs would use the direct maps after they are initialized, it would be able to get at the user files. Sending autofs one “HUP” to tell it to re-read after it has already loaded solves the problem, but then you have to see an error in syslog for each machine that says that it couldn't read the home dir/rspace map files followed by it being able to. I then decided that instead of pointing at user/rspace maps, I would write a script that could extract the information from the map file in /cse/local/share. This actually worked fine, but didn't feel right. Why should a script need to run for each mount when the data is already sitting in a file, and autofs is capable of searching that file!!!?? I decided to just mount /cse/local and /cse/local/share in /etc/fstab, but of course because of the problems with mountall, this won't work (only /cse/local would be mounted - not /cse/local/share). In the end, I added /cse/local and /cse/local/share in /etc/fstab as “noauto” (so they aren't mounted by default), and then wrote a start script “csemounts” which mounts them before automounter starts.