What is AMD?

Rhino_G3

Rhino_G3

Registered
... and not advanced micro devices.

I'm mucking around in the system trying to find something new and ran across AMD in the /usr/share directory. Inside the file amd.conf I found this


os = sos5
# (amd -o)
osver = 2.5.1
# full os name
full_os = linux-2.2.5
# OS vendor
vendor = redhat
Click to expand...

Aparently it came from redhat originaly, and been out for a while if they're talking about the 2.2.5 kernel. I'm just not exactly sure what it is and what it does
 
amd is the automount daemon. It actaully has nothing to do with linux, and has been around long before the existance of linux. Basically amd is the BSD equivelent of SVR4's automount system. It's purpose is to automatically handle the mounting and unmounting of NFS (and any other type of remote directory it may support) directories as they are needed and no longer needed. Normally in the unix world a user needs root privleges to mount and unmount shares on other servers. Automount allows this to be done by users without special permissions. Ofcourse, what they can and can not mount is still controlled by the config setup on that system. By using amd instead of static mounts you can save system resources, and also increase stability by not having to deal with losses of mounts due to servers going away and other sorts of hassels. Ofcourse, this is also an overly simplistic description of amd as it (along with it's far superior realitive automount/autofs) is one of the most powerful tools that exist in the unix world for making seemless environments across multiple servers (in hetero and homogenous environments) and the ability to make changes to core resources on the network without any affect on the users. Or, if setup by someone who is an idiot, the biggest headache you can ever imagine :)

Brian
 
Ahh, I see now. thanks! What threw me off was the next .conf file I found in that directory. All it was speaking about was mailer prefs. The automount daemon does sound more reasonable. Thanks again.
 
The orginator's name was "John Micheal Penrdy" or something close. AMD came after automonter from SUN MicroSystems and had loads of better capabilities than the original automounter, i.e. one could set lots of paramters which could better reflect the issues of your site, like timeouts and mount point hiding. Example (in the old days) in and NFS environment cd to a known automount point, then cd ... In the old days this would put you one level up on the remote filesystem, which was a security issue yo uwould have access to data that you should have none. This probably as a result of AMD has now been incorporated into automounter and autofs.

Automount maps were an issue on that he syntax was not compatible with automounter, I found this back in 1993 it was a pain writting scripts to go from one map the other in a NIS environment, i.e, mixing automounter and AMD maps.

AMD (YAM etc) is public domain, unlike automounter amd autofs.
 
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