Hack #58. Keep Filesystems Handy, but Out of Your Way
Use the amd automounter, and some handy defaults, to maintain mounted resources without doing without your own local resources.
The amd automounter isn't the most ubiquitous production service I've ever seen, but it can certainly be a valuable tool for administrators in the setup of their own desktop machines. Why? Because it gives you the power to be able to easily and conveniently access any NFS share in your environment, and the default settings for amd put all of them under their own directory, out of the way, without you having to do much more than simply start the service.
Here's an example of how useful this can be. I work in an environment in which the /usr/local directories on our production machines are mounted from a central NFS server. This is great, because if we need to build software for our servers that isn't supplied by the distribution vendor, we can just build it from source in that tree, and all of the servers can access it as soon as it's built. However, occasionally we receive support tickets saying that something is acting strangely or isn't working. Most times, the issue is environmental: the user is getting at the wrong binary because /usr/local is not in her PATH, or something simple like that. Sometimes, though, the problem is ours, and we need to troubleshoot it.
The most convenient way to do that is just to mount the shared /usr/local to our desktops and use it in place of our own. For me, however, ...