Can systemd automounter unmount inactive fileystems?

Hi,
tl;dr: Can systemd automounter unmount fileystems after a period of inactivity, like autofs does?
I've just started discovering the wonderful new world of systemd, and to my great joy I found that it contains an automounter, so I thought that I would be able to use that instead of using autofs.
The single thing that I like to automount is my home NAS on my laptop (via NFSv4) that I every day take from home to work and then back home.
To do this with autofs is kind of like killing mosquitoes with a flamethrower. I would much rather just have my automounted NAS defined in my fstab than having to force the slightly mysterious autofs.xxx-files to mount the drive with the options I want it to use.
So, I got systemd to automount my NAS and all was joy! Until I realized that it wasnt unmounting it after a time of non-use. I have googled quite a bit, searched the forums, but have found no mention that systemd either has or doesnt have this kind of functionality.
So my purpose with this post is to get a definitive answer, does systemd do this? And if it doesn't, maybe others searching for the same information will end up here, and find the answer...
/DonO

I've been having this problem for as long as I can remember. I have finally decided to sit down and work something out instead of my laptop hanging all the time when it can't find the nfs server. The systemd.automount feature is nice, but it really sucks that it does not auto unmount when the share is not found.
Also, having systemd.automount means that every time I open vim, or a manpage, and there is no network connection, systemd tries to mount the shares. I'm not sure why because I am not directly accessing them. Everything loads slowly when systemd automount is active for my shares and there is no network connection.
Using soft instead of hard is a workaround, but then when the network connection is lost, corruption can occur.
It seems like the only way to really solve this problem is to have some kind of script run when the network comes up to mount the shares, and to unmount when it goes down. This would require custom systemd units or something. Diving into the systemd manuals is something I have been putting off because they are so hefty.
For anyone that is interested, here is my fstab:
lithium:/mnt/data /mnt/data nfs noauto,noatime,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,soft,retry=0,timeo=3,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=1ms 0 0
lithium:/var/cache/pacman /var/cache/pacman nfs noauto,noatime,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,soft,retry=0,timeo=3,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=1ms 0 0
Last edited by demizer (2013-07-14 09:00:23)

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X-systemd.automount nfs drive

Hi,
I can't seem to get systemd.automount to behave. I have an nfs share available on machine 'kombi' and am trying to access it from machine 'forrest':
[root@forrest ~]# showmount -e kombi
Export list for kombi:
/mnt/nfs4/georgia 192.168.1.202
/mnt/nfs4 192.168.1.202
It is set up to automount in /etc/fstab:
kombi:/georgia /mnt/georgia nfs4 rw,suid,dev,exec,noauto,nouser,async,clientaddr=192.168.1.202,_netdev,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.device-timeout=8 0 0
Logging output from journalctl indicates it timed out but then mounted:
Dec 14 17:45:11 forrest systemd[1]: mnt-georgia.mount mounting timed out. Stopping.
Dec 14 17:45:11 forrest systemd[1]: Mounted /mnt/georgia.
Dec 14 17:45:11 forrest systemd[1]: Mounted /mnt/georgia.
However it is not mounted. Any process trying to access /mnt/georgia hangs.
Any ideas where I have gone wrong? I don't care if it automounts at boot or at first access. What I'd like is for it to gracefully handle mounting when 'kombi' is up, and unmounting when 'kombi' is down.

Thanks, I guess I have misread other advice on the forums. Even systemd.mount man page states:
If x-systemd.device-timeout= is specified it may be used to configure how long systemd should wait for a device to show up before giving up on an entry from /etc/fstab.
From this statement I would expect the remote filesystem to not be mounted if the other machine is down, but not to cause a local process to hang trying to access the unmounted directory.
It looks like autofs may be the way to go - from the NFS wiki:
Using autofs is useful when multiple machines want to connect via NFS; they could both be clients as well as servers. The reason this method is preferable over the earlier one is that if the server is switched off, the client will not throw errors about being unable to find NFS shares.

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I've been using sshfs to access files on my pi for serveral months now. Today i tried to enable automatic mounting with x-systemd.automount, but although a manual mount is still possible, the automatic mount fails constantly with a "no such device" error since i added the additional option in /etc/fstab. Journalctl -f on the pi reveals that the "Connection is closed [preauth]", so I would guess that something is wrong with my client authenticating. But I don't understand how is this possible because I can in fact mount the partition manually. Even if I use the exact command used by systemd (found via ps -fe) with root it prompts me for the password of my key and then it mounts correctly. Shouldn't automount then prompt for my password, when my X starts? Any ideas?
line in /etc/fstab:
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Last edited by MrTea (2013-07-01 15:34:13)

WonderWoofy is right, until now I always used the automatically generated nautilus entry to mount the remote folder. In this case mount command is executed as <user> and so I don't need to put the additional information in the /etc/fstab. btw i didn't exactly look this up, but I've used this setup for quiet some time now, and I guess, that I forgot the herrzinter@ part once and noted that it worked anyway
I now added this and the "IdentityFile=/..." option pointing to a dummy ssh key without passphrase and it then it's working, but I am not to happy with this, as an empty passphare key is not really nice, and also nautilus is showing me duplicated entries... but in genreal I have to look at the setup again I am not sure anymore if the x-systemd.automount option is really such a good idea in my case, as the network setup of my laptop is changing quite often... perhaps a bash script at login, or a custom systemd unit is better suited for my purpose
Thank you all anyway

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Hi,
Per the suggestion on the systemd wiki page, I have instructed systemd (via /etc/fstab) to automount /home. This is supposed to allow me to boot faster on those occasions when my /home needs to be fsck'ed. (Please correct me if I've misunderstood this point.) This results in "mount" reporting that my /home filesystem type is "autofs".
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I have set up OD and the client computers up with mobile accounts that store their home directory locally but still allow authentication. I lumped the appropriate users into a group, say "officegroup", with their own share, /Groups/officegroup.
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How can I automount Time Capsul

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TIA
Grant.

Hi,
Just found this on another forum. It worked for me.
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Finder > Go > Connect to Server
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afs://192.168.1.1
When you click "connect" it will prompt you for a username and password. Use the login information that you entered when you set up your Time Capsule. A finder window will appear, giving you access to the Time Capsule's disk.
Depending on which version of OS X you're running, it may or may not have put an icon on your desktop for the mounted disk. You can fix this by checking the "Connected Servers" checkbox in: Finder > Preferences > General
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System Preferences > Accounts
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http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1081185&tstart=0

Well, the problem with rm the folder is that it still leaves data hanging around (profile, home drive, etc.) I was really hoping for something that would sweep up everything from people that are no longer in the OpenDirectory database.
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Later...
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[Solved] Systemd automounts /boot (was mlocate not traversing /boot)

For some reason, mlocate does not index my /boot:
┌─[Shiv ~ ]
└─╼ locate vmlinuz-linux
/home/jason/Build/chroot/root/boot/vmlinuz-linux
┌─[Shiv ~ ]
└─╼ sudo updatedb -U /boot
[sudo] password for jason:
┌─[Shiv ~ ]
└─╼ locate vmlinuz-linux
/boot/vmlinuz-linux
/boot/vmlinuz-linux-jwr
┌─[Shiv ~ ]
└─╼ sudo updatedb
┌─[Shiv ~ ]
└─╼ locate vmlinuz-linux
/home/jason/Build/chroot/root/boot/vmlinuz-linux
My /etc/updatedb.conf is the stock Arch one, /boot is obviously mounted (as the -U switch works), but a plain updatedb does not return any results from /boot.
I recently moved my ESP from /boot/efi to /boot, and as this is the only machine exhibiting this behaviour, it leads me to suspect something is amiss here.
My fstab:
# ESP: /dev/sda1
UUID=696A-09B3 /boot vfat defaults,relatime,discard 0 2
# /dev/mapper/vgroup-lvroot
UUID=1d2dfd7d-adeb-4786-ag98-c8fg675f8e2f / ext4 rw,relatime,discard,data=ordered 0 1
# /dev/mapper/vgroup-lvhome
UUID=50798021-94b5-4011-a593-9087gfhcd59b8 /home ext4 rw,relatime,discard 0 2
Am I missing something obvious?
# edit: updated thread title with the cause, as opposed to the symptom...

WonderWoofy wrote:There is a mechanism in systemd (or maybe gummiboot) that mounts the ESP on /boot as a systemd autostart unit. So it shows up as autofs, which mlocate does not venture into.
Bingo!
┌─[Shiv ~ ]
└─╼ mount | grep boot
systemd-1 on /boot type autofs (rw,relatime,fd=36,pgrp=1,timeout=300,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct)
/dev/sda1 on /boot type vfat (rw,relatime,fmask=0022,dmask=0022,codepage=437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,errors=remount-ro,discard)
falconindy wrote:If there's one thing I've learned about remote debugging over the years, it's to not trust people.
Especially Antipodeans
lolilolicon wrote:I Googled for this and found this relevant talk in our (duh) wiki
I spent some time yesterday searching, but missed this--to my shame
65kid on the wiki wrote:* this feature isn't even documented in systemd yet
Great. Any way to suppress this?

Can systemd automounter unmount inactive fileystems?

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