Networking Guide
Chapter 13, Configuring the NFS automounter

Use of redundant servers

Use of redundant servers

automount allows an NFS client to specify more than one NFS server as the source of a filesystem that the client wishes to mount. For example, if two different servers export an identical read-only directory, an NFS client running automount can include both servers in the maps that the automount daemon reads. When such a duplication of possible servers exists, the automount daemon locates the first available server (using an RPC query) and mounts the filesystem from that system.

One of the obvious benefits of having more than one server from which to mount is that it provides a backup should one of the servers go down or become unreachable. Specifying multiple servers is best used for mounting read-only filesystems. See ``Specifying redundant servers'' for more information and an example.