Seagull's Bane - Linux automounter

Automounting is handled by a kernel filesystem (autofs) talking to a userspace daemon (e.g. bane). The filesystem must be mounted by the daemon and in the filesystem options a file descriptor number is passed. Generally this is the writable end of a pipe. The daemon can then read messages (defined in linux/auto_fs.h) from that pipe.

The messages are triggered whenever a processes (other than the daemon) touches a dentry in the root of the autofs mount point that isn't a mount point itself. In this case a missing packet is sent to the daemon and the daemon must mount the correct filesystem in place before telling the kernel to unblock processes that are disk waiting on access to that dentry. The daemon can, of course, fail and tell the kernel so that processes get an EEXIST.

Bane consists of three parts: the daemon, the slave and the janitor. The daemon is as described above. The slave is responsible for name->mount_information lookups and the janitor looks for slave NFS filesystems and gets rid of them.

Requires:

• GCC at least 3
• Linux at least 2.4.19
• GLIB devel packages

To build: make && make install. To run, something like bane -t 300 /homes bane_flatfile /etc/auto.homes

0.56: Builds on 2.6 kernels

0.55: Addition of bane_state.py to query a running bane

0.50: More comments. Man pages added. Janitor now builds with 2.4 mount options on

bane_autonet.pl: A slave for mounting by server name. Jonathan Hudson