The automounter is useful for centralizing administrative tasks and decreasing a particular volume's dependency on a single server. Automounting allows you to mount removable media such as CD-ROMs and floppies on-demand. You can configure the automounter to mount network filesystems such as NFS volumes as well. When configured to do so, the Linux automounter mounts filesystems automatically the first time you access them. The automounter makes filesystems automatically accessible whenever you need them.
The automounter works by monitoring a particular directory (called an automount point) and taking action whenever a user changes to one of its subdirectories.

To get automounting to work, you need to

1. Configure /etc/auto.master to monitor directories you wish to automount. The format for this file is automount_point map_file. To monitor /auto for accesses, you'd use /auto /etc/auto.local.
2. Configure each map file. For example, /etc/auto.local might contain your local floppy drive. The following MouseOver illustrates an example of the floppy drive entry in /etc/auto.local.

Auto Floppy Mount
The next lesson describes the steps to set up the automounter.