Berkeley Automounter

Last updated
am-utils
Developer(s) Erez Zadok
Stable release
6.2 / Oct 30, 2014
Operating system Cross-platform
Type NFS Automounter
License BSD License
Website http://www.am-utils.org/

In computing the Berkeley Automounter (or amd) is a computer automounter daemon which first appeared in 4.4BSD in 1994. The original Berkeley automounter was created by Jan-Simon Pendry in 1989 and was donated to Berkeley. [1] After languishing for a few years, the maintenance was picked up by Erez Zadok, who has maintained it since 1993.

Contents

The am-utils package which comprises and is included with FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. It is also included with a vast number of Linux distributions, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora Core, ASPLinux, Trustix, Mandriva, and others.

The Berkeley automounter has a large number of contributors, including several who worked on the original automounter with Jan-Simon Pendry.

It is one of the oldest and more portable automounters available today, as well as the most flexible and the most widely used.[ citation needed ]

Caveats

There are a few "side effects" that come with files that are mounted using automounter, these may differ depending on how the service was configured.

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Plan 9 from Bell Labs</span> Distributed operating system

Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system which originated from the Computing Science Research Center (CSRC) at Bell Labs in the mid-1980s and built on UNIX concepts first developed there in the late 1960s. Since 2000, Plan 9 has been free and open-source. The final official release was in early 2015.

ls Command to list files and directories in Unix and Unix-like operating systems

In computing, ls is a command to list computer files and directories in Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is specified by POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification.

In computing, a symbolic link is a file whose purpose is to point to a file or directory by specifying a path thereto.

The Unix file system (UFS) is a family of file systems supported by many Unix and Unix-like operating systems. It is a distant descendant of the original filesystem used by Version 7 Unix.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Portage (software)</span> Gentoo package management system

Portage is a package management system originally created for and used by Gentoo Linux and also by Chrome OS, Calculate, Sabayon, and Funtoo Linux among others. Portage is based on the concept of ports collections. Gentoo is sometimes referred to as a meta-distribution due to the extreme flexibility of Portage, which makes it operating-system-independent. The Gentoo/Alt project is concerned with using Portage to manage other operating systems, such as BSDs, macOS and Solaris. The most notable of these implementations is the Gentoo/FreeBSD project.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew Dillon</span> American software engineer

Matthew Dillon is an American software engineer known for Amiga software, contributions to FreeBSD and for starting and leading the DragonFly BSD project since 2003.

Unionfs is a filesystem service for Linux, FreeBSD and NetBSD which implements a union mount for other file systems. It allows files and directories of separate file systems, known as branches, to be transparently overlaid, forming a single coherent file system. Contents of directories which have the same path within the merged branches will be seen together in a single merged directory, within the new, virtual filesystem.

The Unix command su, which stands for 'substitute user', is used by a computer user to execute commands with the privileges of another user account. When executed it invokes a shell without changing the current working directory or the user environment.

Unix-like operating systems identify a user by a value called a user identifier, often abbreviated to user ID or UID. The UID, along with the group identifier (GID) and other access control criteria, is used to determine which system resources a user can access. The password file maps textual user names to UIDs. UIDs are stored in the inodes of the Unix file system, running processes, tar archives, and the now-obsolete Network Information Service. In POSIX-compliant environments, the command-line command id gives the current user's UID, as well as more information such as the user name, primary user group and group identifier (GID).

The proc filesystem (procfs) is a special filesystem in Unix-like operating systems that presents information about processes and other system information in a hierarchical file-like structure, providing a more convenient and standardized method for dynamically accessing process data held in the kernel than traditional tracing methods or direct access to kernel memory. Typically, it is mapped to a mount point named /proc at boot time. The proc file system acts as an interface to internal data structures about running processes in the kernel. In Linux, it can also be used to obtain information about the kernel and to change certain kernel parameters at runtime (sysctl).

NILFS or NILFS2 is a log-structured file system implementation for the Linux kernel. It was developed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) CyberSpace Laboratories and a community from all over the world. NILFS was released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).

In Unix-like operating systems, a loop device, vnd, or lofi is a pseudo-device that makes a computer file accessible as a block device.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FreeBSD</span> Free Unix-like operating system

FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which was based on Research Unix. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993. In 2005, FreeBSD was the most popular open-source BSD operating system, accounting for more than three-quarters of all installed and permissively licensed BSD systems.

In computer operating systems, union mounting is a way of combining multiple directories into one that appears to contain their combined contents. Union mounting is supported in Linux, BSD and several of its successors, and Plan 9, with similar but subtly different behavior.

An automounter is any program or software facility which automatically mounts filesystems in response to access operations by user programs. An automounter system utility, when notified of file and directory access attempts under selectively monitored subdirectory trees, dynamically and transparently makes local or remote devices accessible.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Berkeley Software Distribution</span> Unix operating system

The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley. The term "BSD" commonly refers to its descendants, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and DragonFly BSD.

XZ Utils is a set of free software command-line lossless data compressors, including lzma and xz, for Unix-like operating systems and, from version 5.0 onwards, Microsoft Windows.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rump kernel</span> Software run in userspace that offers kernel functionality

The NetBSD rump kernel is the first implementation of the "anykernel" concept where drivers either can be compiled into or run in the monolithic kernel or in user space on top of a light-weight kernel. The NetBSD drivers can be used on top of the rump kernel on a wide range of POSIX operating systems, such as the Hurd, Linux, NetBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris kernels and even Cygwin, along with the file system utilities built with the rump libraries. The rump kernels can also run without POSIX directly on top of the Xen hypervisor, an L4 microkernel using the Genode OS Framework or even on "OS-less" bare metal.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">SDF Public Access Unix System</span> Shell provider

Super Dimension Fortress is a non-profit public access UNIX shell provider on the Internet. It has been in continual operation since 1987 as a non-profit social club. The name is derived from the Japanese anime series The Super Dimension Fortress Macross; the original SDF server was a BBS for anime fans. From its BBS roots, which have been well documented as part of the BBS: The Documentary project, SDF has grown into a feature-rich provider serving members around the world.

The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s.

References

  1. Jan-Simon Pendry (1989-12-01). "''Amd'' - An Automounter". Newsgroup:  comp.unix.wizards . Retrieved 2007-12-23.