Talk:Berkeley Automounter

The Berkeley automounter has existed for now close to 17 years (eons in the computer business) and was introduced with 4.4BSD (a legend in its own right).

This is no lightweight daemon that someone just came up with, but rather one that is legendary and has a book dedicated to its use.

I did some double checking: cron, vixie cron, sendmail, bind, and tomcat all have their own pages - and some of them are much younger than amd. In fact, possibly all of those mentioned are younger except cron.

I'm not sure what the problem would be with including the Berkeley automounter.

In any case, non-notable isn't a reason for speedy deletion as I read the docs here. I checked my talk page for notes, and there weren't any.  DavidDouthitt  (Talk) 07:48, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I did some more checking, and found that sendmail and bind are just as old.... sendmail, bind, and amd were all included in 4.4BSD; the documentation can be seen in the 4.4BSD System Manager's Manual (SMM) - parts of which are available freely from http://www.freebsd.org and which book remains available on the used market from Amazon resellers and others.  DavidDouthitt  (Talk) 08:50, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

I should mention, too: there were talks given about using amd or related utilities at the LISA 1993 conference, the LISA 1999 conference, as well as USENIX 2002. LISA is the Large Installation Systems Administration conference, and USENIX is the user's group for UNIX. Both the USENIX conference and the LISA conference are very big among UNIX System Administrators.

So... this is no "minor" utility that no one really cares about.  DavidDouthitt  (Talk) 09:00, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

According to Wikipedia:Notability (software) this software would be considered notable. It is contained within HP-UX (current), and just about every Linux distribution, and it was part of 4.4BSD which is a notable historical distribution. These are just the ones that I know of; it can almost certainly be found in a variety of UNIX environments outside of Solaris.

The Berkeley Automounter was discussed in a multi-part article in ;login (an industry newsletter coming from USENIX/SAGE) beginning in May/June of 1993, and written by John Stewart. amd at that would have been just getting adopted by Erez Zadok and not being maintained by its original author, Jan-Simon Pendry.

A search using rpmfind shows that am-utils (the package containing amd) has been included in Red Hat 4.1 and up (including the recent Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Fedora Core, PLD (a bleeding edge Polish distribution), ASPLinux, Conectiva, Trustix, Mandrake, and Mandriva. All of these (except PLD) are notable distributions, almost all with commercial support (now or in the past). The search on rpmfind.net is at this URL. Further searching also finds support in TurboLinux, a significant Japanese distribution.

Note that these are only those distributions that support RPM.

Searching through the manual pages for each system, I didn't see support under HP-UX (I must confess); however, it is apparently included in NetBSD 3.0, OpenBSD 3.9, and FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT.

am-utils has also been supported by companies such as IBM, Intel, and HP.

The OpenLDAP HowTo found here discusses support for an amd schema; the specifics begin here.

During the Linux kernel development that resulted in Linux 2.0.18, there was a flurry of discussion about a patch which broke amd operations. One message in this thread can be seen here.

Searching for the Berkeley automounter on Google or elsewhere can be somewhat decieving, since (of course) amd and Berkeley have common significant non-automounter related uses.

I find it interesting no one's replied to me yet....  DavidDouthitt  (Talk) 17:22, 12 October 2006 (UTC)