Mounting XtreemFS Volumes using Autofs

Autofs is a useful tool to mount networked file systems automatically on access, for instance on machines without a permanent network connectivity like notebooks. We prepared a short tutorial that describes how to use automounter for XtreemFS volumes.

This assumes you'd like a shared directory called /scratch/xtfs/shared across all of your machines and anyone can read/write to it. While I use /scratch in this example, more traditional /net could be used instead.

• Assume all of XtreemFS is installed, set up properly, volumes are created...
• Have autofs installed (and started or not).
• Create an /etc/auto.master with these contents:

# All xtreemfs volumes will be automounted in /scratch/xtfs
/scratch/xtfs   /etc/auto.xtfs
#
# Include /etc/auto.master.d/*.autofs
#
+dir:/etc/auto.master.d
#
# Include central master map if it can be found using
# nsswitch sources.
#
# Note that if there are entries for /net or /misc (as
# above) in the included master map any keys that are the
# same will not be seen as the first read key seen takes
# precedence.
#
+auto.master

• Then create an /etc/auto.xtfs (which you'll have to modify for your DIR).

shared -fstype=fuse,allow_other :mount.xtreemfs#dir.example.com/volume-0

• Restart autofs (A command similar to this):

sudo /etc/init.d/autofs restart

• Do this for each machine on which you'd like to use autofs.

Thanks to Pete for contributing this tutorial!