ADSM and the Sun Automounter

ADSM does not appear to get along well with the Unix automounter.

We have a number of Sun workstations that use automounting, and ADSM
has been doing some strange things.  In fact, they're not so strange
at all from the viewpoint of ADSM, when you think about it.

Basically, ADSM makes a determination of what is NFS mounted and
what is local, presumably by looking at what's currently mounted
at installation time (can't really say for sure with these OCO
products).  If there are automounted filesystems, they will be in
one of two states:

        (1) currently mounted under the /tmp_mnt directory
        (2) currently not mounted

If (1), then ADSM just skips them by default, unless you tell it
otherwise.  No problem there.

If (2), then ADSM doesn't know that those directories represent
NFS-mounted filesystems, and doesn't make a distinction.  The
usual result is that while it is processing root, it looks at
/tmp_mnt and tries to back up everything it finds there.  Several
wrong results ensue:

        (1) It backs up NFS-mounted files that really live on
            other machines, which we didn't intend for it to do.
        (2) The original determination of what's there triggers
            the automounter to reactivate the mount, but by the
            time ADSM gets around to backing up some of the files,
            the temporary mount has timed out and gone away.  ADSM
            then whines about not being able to access the file, or
            automounter thrashing occurs.

To make a long story short, I found that I needed to do two (2) things
to get around this:

        (1) add a virtual mount point for /tmp_mnt to dsm.sys

            VIRTUALMOUNTPOINT /tmp_mnt

        (2) add the following line to the inclexcl file:

            exclude /tmp_mnt/.../*

The first, as far as I can tell, asks ADSM to pretend that /tmp_mnt
is a real filesystem, to be backed up or not backed up depending on
what my DOMAIN line specifies, or according to ADSM's defaults.

The second line insures that, no matter what, ADSM will not back up
anything it happens to find in /tmp_mnt.

I'm not positive I need both, but I ended up doing it that way, and
it seems to solve the problem.

It would be useful if IBM either documented the proper procedure
for dealing with the automounter or actually put code into the
ADSM Unix client to handle this.

 - seb

P.S. I would appreciate any and all corrections from wise folk
re the above scenario descriptions.