AutoFS: Automount Shares
AutoFS
Introduction
autofs is a program for automatically mounting directories on an as-needed basis. Auto-mounts are mounted only as they are accessed, and are unmounted after a period of inactivity. Because of this, automounting NFS/Samba shares conserves bandwidth and offers better overall performance compared to static mounts via fstab.
The master configuration file for autofs is /etc/auto.master by default. Unless you have a good reason for changing this, leave it as the default.
Note on /net and /smb
These two default configurations may be useful for your set-up. If you have a lot of NFS or Samba shares, you may want to uncomment these lines. /net enables auto-mounting of file systems elsewhere on the network which are exported by NFS. For example, if you have a server named fileserver with an NFS export directory called /export, you can mount it by typing in a shell command line cd /net/fileserver/export. In an environment with NFS file servers, such a configuration can be useful. /smb functions the same way but is for Samba file systems. However, if you need to authenticate before accessing the Samba share, automount will not function.