Linux/Services/Automount

Automatically mount a partition when usage starts, and unmount it after it is not used for a while.

Use case

Every harddisk outside the machine itself has the chance to loose connection for a while. External USB harddisks can be pulled off the machine, and mappings to shares on other machines can be lost when such other machine reboots. In these cases there is no clean unmount, and remount often does not happen.

Autofs

Autofs unmounts a mount point after it is not used for a few minutes. So a disk that is barely used, like an external backup disk, can be pulled off the machine safely at almost any time. And the new disk will be mounted automatically when the mount point starts being used.

Install

yum install autofs