All,

I'm trying to back up a directory on a Linux client server (let's call 
the directory /mnt/devices/); this directory contains links to several 
autofs mounted devices. I've set up a policy to back up the entire 
directory, but I've run into an odd problem. It seems that the backup 
job steps into one of the autofs mounted directories, and begins backing 
up files, only to have the following happen: 1) the backup job fail on a 
particular file in one of the autofs mounted directories, or 2) the 
backup job succeeds on several of the autofs mounted directories, but 
intermittently is unable to mount one of them.

It appears that the autofs timeout (in this case, 300 seconds) expires 
while Netbackup is in the process of backing up a particular file (or, 
more explicitly, while it is _not_ making a mount request for a given 
directory or file). Is there any way to prevent this behavior? To put it 
another way, does anyone here back up Linux clients with devices mounted 
via autofs, and if so do you have any tips or advice?

I apologize in advance if any of this is unclear or if I'm making any 
incorrect assumptions - any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

Adam Bigdeli
Network Engineer
Logicworks