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jayasinghe

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2011-12-16

Posts: 23

Website

systemd automount vs. autofs

Hi!

I am a more or less happy user of autofs. I am mounting scards, cdrom, usb, and most importantly NFS shares on my NAS. While switching to systemd recently I learned that systemd now has similar capacities builtin. What are your experiences with the builtin automounter? How does it compare to autofs? And which one would you recommend?

Best Regards,
Robin

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: systemd automount vs. autofs

I had never really gotten into using autofs.  Before systemd, I has always thought I should get that going on my system, so I had read some documentation, but never actually went through with it.  But since switching to systemd, and discovering this built in functionality, I have been using it quite a bit.  It works very well.  I like it because it is native to system, so it is just one layer of stuffs that has the potential to go wrong.

Getting to working is also insanely simple as well.  Just make an fstab entry as normal, and then add "noauto,x-systemd.automount" to the options.  Then a native mount and automount unit will be created in /run/systemd/generator. 

I don't know why, but it makes me happy to copy these units to the /etc/systemd/system directory so that they are persistent.  Then I take out the unnecesssary parts like the "SourcePath=/etc/fstab". Finally, I add an [Install] section with "WantedBy=local-fs.target" (or whatever I think is appropriate) into the automount unit.  This way I can comment out/delete the line in the fstab and enable the spruced up automount unit.

GI Jack

Member

Registered: 2010-12-29

Posts: 92

Re: systemd automount vs. autofs

perminantly mounted disks just get /etc/fstabs

for everyting else, I am perfectly OK with letting the filemanager handle it with thunar and XFCE.

WonderWoofy

Member

From: Los Gatos, CA

Registered: 2012-05-19

Posts: 8,414

Re: systemd automount vs. autofs

perminantly mounted disks just get /etc/fstabs

for everyting else, I am perfectly OK with letting the filemanager handle it with thunar and XFCE.

It is nice that you have a preference, but your response does not even remotely address the actual question that the OP is asking...