What I Know About Linux That You May Not Know

Red Hat has introduced support for autofs5 in RHEL4. The default version of autofs in RHEL4 is autofs4 which has a lot of limitations. The biggest limitation of autofs4 is that doesn't have support for direct mounts. With the introduction of autofs5 in RHEL4, one can achieve all the features of autofs5 in RHEL4.

I wanted to run the autofs configuration that I explained here with ldap support which includes examples for both direct and indirect mounts in RHEL4 and below are the steps that I followed.

- The minimum update level to support autofs5 in RHEL4 is U7. The kernel version required is 2.6.9-78 and above. So I updated my system to RHEL4 U7 and the kernel running is 2.6.9-78.0.13.EL

- Install "autofs5" rpm.

up2date autofs5 or rpm -ivh autofs5-blah-blah.rpm

- It's best to turn off autofs v4 while using v5 to avoid conflict. Autofs5 supports everything in autofs4 and there is no need to run both of them at the same time.

chkconfig autofs off
service autofs stop

- Edit /etc/sysconfig/autofs5 and uncomment the schema definitions that you are following in your network. I uncommented the below lines to follow schema III that I explained here

- Edit /etc/auto.master and add the below line into it.

+auto.master

This step is very important as the default rhel4 /etc/auto.master does not include this line unlike RHEL5. So if you forget this step, maps will not be read from LDAP.

- Start "autofs5" service.

chkconfig autofs5 on
service autofs5 start

It should work just like in RHEL5.