Automounter

Article summary

An automounter is any program or software facility which automatically mounts filesystems in response to access operations by user programs. An automounter system utility (daemon under Unix), when notified of file and directory access attempts under selectively monitored subdirectory trees, dynamically and transparently makes local or remote devices accessible. The automounter has the purpose of conserving local system resources and of reducing the coupling between systems which share filesystems with a number of servers. For example, a large to mid-sized organization might have hundreds of file servers and thousands of workstations or other nodes accessing files from any number of those servers at any time. Usually, only a relatively small number of remote filesystems (exports) will be active on any given node at any given time. Deferring the mounting of such a filesystem until a process actually needs to access it reduces the need to track such mounts, increasing reliability, flexibility and performance. Frequently, one or more fileservers will become inaccessible (down for maintenance, on a remote and temporarily disconnected network, or accessed via a congested link). Administrators also often find it necessary to relocate data from one file server to another - to resolve capacity issues and balance the load.…

Key claims

1. release date: 1992 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
2. The record states that the release date is "1992". What evidence would count against this claim?
3. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
4. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1363673670