Suppose that you have been charged with building a traffic trackingsystem for your NAT gateway to be used when the campus NOC callsyou up to report that your gateway is doing too much of thewrong sort of traffic and gives you the remote IP addressesinvolved. At the same time you don't want to log too much information , so that all this juicy traffic datayou're gathering can't be used to do something like find out all thewebsites someone has been visiting.

No problems; you'

The automounter was more or less created to solve one problem: tryingto avoid having your machine hang when any of the huge list of pokeymachines that exported NFS filesystems that you needed once in a bluemoon went down. Again.

This problem is really an artifact of a much earlier age, of a time whendisk space was so expensive that any machine with any amount of surplusdisk space was pressed into general service. This created a massive webof NFS crossmounts and in the end made everyone's machine depend

Here is a principle of practical system administration:

Later never comes.

Specifically, don't defer something until 'later', because it's nevergoing to happen. Unless you are exceptionally well disciplined and lucky, either you will have lost track of things by the time you havethe free time or you'll discover that any number of other bits nowdepend on the state of the world as it is, and it is no longer at allsimple to change it.

(A surprising amount of practical