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From: Nick Naym on 26 Apr 2010 14:37 I may have asked this a long time ago; if so, my apologies for repeating myself. Recently, my Hardware Growler has been informing me of the mounting of the "home" and "net" volumes. I do recall (and just verified) that they are invisibles that are in the window for my Computer (under Devices), but don't recall what they represent. I'm also a bit puzzled why Hardware Growler suddenly is reporting on their behavior. -- iMac (27", 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 4 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD) � OS X (10.6.3)
From: Jolly Roger on 1 May 2010 13:37
In article <C7FB55A0.59DFA%nicknaym@_remove_this_gmail.com.invalid>, Nick Naym <nicknaym@_remove_this_gmail.com.invalid> wrote: > I may have asked this a long time ago; if so, my apologies for repeating > myself. > > Recently, my Hardware Growler has been informing me of the mounting of the > "home" and "net" volumes. I do recall (and just verified) that they are > invisibles that are in the window for my Computer (under Devices), but don't > recall what they represent. I'm also a bit puzzled why Hardware Growler > suddenly is reporting on their behavior. As to why Hardware Growler is reporting anything, I haven't a clue. I question the actual usefulness of that utility. The /home and /net directories are mentioned in the Unix filesystem hierarchy standard: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard> While it is standard practice to have these directories (as actual root directories or mounted file systems) in any Unix system, in Mac OS X they seem to be largely unused in a default installation. Anyhow, if you do a 'df', you can see they are indeed mounted volumes in Mac OS X: # df -h Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on (snip) map -hosts 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% /net map auto_home 0Bi 0Bi 0Bi 100% /home These are autofs mounted volumes. I'm not 100% sure about the specific details of Apple's Mac OS X autofs implementation, so I'll just describe what I know from most other Unix systems I've dealt with. The autofs (automount) service is responsible for automatically mounting network volumes to different locations in the file system. It appears that Apple is using a /etc/autofs.conf configuration file, though everything in it is commented (disabled), which may mean autofs is running with all default configuration settings in Mac OS X. I also see that /etc/auto_home and /etc/auto_master exist in my Mac OS X 10.6 installation. If you look at /etc/auto_master, you see it has these entries: /net -hosts -nobrowse,hidefromfinder,nosuid /home auto_home -nobrowse,hidefromfinder These are responsible for creating the file system mounts. The /net mount is defined using the autofs "-hosts" mount type. Typically "-hosts" automatic mounts come from /etc/hosts or some other Unix discovery service. Each entry in the hosts file is queried to see if that host is sharing anything. If so, those shares are automatically mounted, and appear in the /net directory. The /home mount is defined using the "auto_home" mount type. Typically, you would populate the /etc/auto_home file with entries instructing autofs to mount home directories as needed (usually at login). In Unix systems I've administered, when we want to mount home directories from a NFS network volume, for instance, we'd have entries like this in the /etc/auto_home file: username server.domain.net:/path/to/home/username I suspect that's enough information for you, but if you want to learn more, many more details are available in the relevant manual pages (autofs.conf, automount, auto_master, etc.) as well as the web. -- Send responses to the relevant news group rather than email to me. E-mail sent to this address may be devoured by my very hungry SPAM filter. Due to Google's refusal to prevent spammers from posting messages through their servers, I often ignore posts from Google Groups. Use a real news client if you want me to see your posts. JR |