Networking Guide
Chapter 13, Configuring the NFS automounter

About automount maps

About automount maps

automount determines which mount points to monitor and which filesystems to mount from a special set of configuration files called maps. Maps can reside on the local machine or be managed via NIS. By convention, all local automount maps are located in the /etc directory and have filenames prefixed with auto.

There are four types of automount map:

You should also understand when map modifications take place.