As well as the regular local device mounts, the autofs daemon can be used to mount remote file systems automatically, as well. To do this, add the following entry in the your /etc/auto.master file:

/nfsmounts /etc/auto.nfs

Now the /nfsmounts directory acts as a root for all the NFS mounts on the client if the auto.nfs file is completed appropriately. The name auto.nfs is chosen for sake of convenience—you can choose any name. In the selected file (create it if it does not exist), add entries for all the NFS mounts as in the following example:

localdata -fstype=nfs server1:/data
nfs4mount -fstype=nfs4 server2:/

Activate the settings with rcautofs start. For this example, /nfsmounts/localdata, the /data directory of server1, is then mounted with NFS and /nfsmounts/nfs4mount from server2 is mounted with NFSv4.

If the /etc/auto.master file is edited while the service autofs is running, the automounter must be restarted for the changes to take effect. Do this with rcautofs restart.

A typical NFSv3 mount entry in /etc/fstab looks like this:

nfs.example.com:/data /local/path nfs rw,noauto 0 0

NFSv4 mounts may also be added to the /etc/fstab file manually. For these mounts, use nfs4 instead of nfs in the third column and make sure that the remote file system is given as / after the nfs.example.com: in the first column. A sample line for an NFSv4 mount in /etc/fstab looks like this:

nfs.example.com:/ /local/pathv4 nfs4 rw,noauto 0 0

The noauto option prevents the file system from being mounted automatically at start up. If you want to mount the respective file system manually, it is possible to shorten the command for mounting and it is only needed to provide the mount point as in:

mount /local/path

Note, that if you do not enter the noauto option, the initialization scripts of the system will handle the mount of those file systems at start up.