Use of AUTOMOUNT

I am posting this for the primary UNIX/ADSM person here.
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Can someone explain exactly what the V2 AUTOMOUNT option does,
when you (the Unix workstation admin) would want to specify it,
and how does it actually work?

The explanation in the "Using the UNIX Backup/Archive Clients"
manual is very unclear.

Also, does it address the problem I had with backing up Sun
workstations under the previous ADSM? I manage a cluster of Suns
that use the automounter extensively.  In order to prevent
ADSM from triggering automounts of remote filesystems and
getting wrapped around the axle, I had to add a VIRTUALMOUNTPOINT
option to my dsm.sys file.  But I found this out by a great deal
of painful trial and error.

In other words, what I want is *not* for ADSM to automount
remote filesystems and back them up as if they were local.
I want ADSM to ignore those filesystems whether they happen
to be automounted at backup time or not.

Here is what I had to do in the past.

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 seemed to solve the problem.

It would be useful if IBM could document the proper procedure
for dealing with the automounter under ADSM V2.

--
Stephen E. Bacher (Batchman)               Phone: (617) 258-1525
Stephen E. Bacher (Batchman)               Phone: (617) 258-1525
The Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Inc.     Email: seb AT draper DOT com
555 Technology Square                     Cambridge, MA 02139

"Knowledge does not corrupt, unless it is arrogant; but then it is
not true knowledge."  -  Elie Wiesel
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Bill Colwell
C. S. Draper Lab
Email: BColwell AT draper DOT com
Voice: 617-258-1550