Automount

According to its manual page, automount "manage[s] autofs mount points." It runs at startup and "sets up mount points for each entry in the master map, allowing them to be automatically mounted when accessed." autofs is the service program that does the mounting/unmounting when needed.

Configuration

automount looks in /etc/auto.master for a map. Our setup apparently requires a non-default mapping:

/net	/etc/auto.net

It is important to note that that is not the default /etc/auto.net either. It seems that the following files in /etc/ are also used by autofs:

• auto.misc.dist
• auto.net
• auto.net.dist

The detailed contents can be found here: Autofs_Configuration_Files.