Sorry for the detail, I want to make sure my question is understood :)
At the office, we use NIS automounts extensively. Quite often, we'll have the same data mirrored in multiple offices, located in different physical buildings. The automounter in Solaris supports multihomed automount maps, so that a client machine will try to mount the closest server (ie, on its subnet) first before trying others. For example:
#ypcat -k auto_project project1 fileserver1,fileserver2:/vol/vol0/data/project1
To make autofs in Fedora Core < 2 support these multihomed mounts, an ex-employee wrote a patch to the nfsmount code in util-linux that does a quick check to determine the network response time of the server, and then mounts the server with the lowest response time, the assumption being that the lowest response time means the server is on the same subnet as the client machine, or at least is the best mount candidate.
As of FC2 + util-linux-2.12a from rawhide (used to support sloppy mounting of mounts with unsupported options), I'm no longer able to rebuild util-linux with the patch. The NFS4 patches to util-linux seem to conflict. util-linux-2.12, included in FC2, seems to pick the first host in the list and mounts that, even if the first host is the furthest away from the client.
Question #1: Does anybody know if multihomed NFS automounts are a feature destined to be included in future versions of util-linux?
Question #2: Would anybody be interested in the patch we have that was easy to apply to util-linux-2.11y but doesn't seem to work out of the box with 2.12a? The ex-employee did try to submit the patch to the upstream maintainers, but never received a response from them at the time.
Question #3: Is this really supported and I just didn't find the magic incantation?
Thanks,
-- jeremy
