NIS + automount fiddling

[Matthew Hawkins]

I love automount too.  In fact, I like the Linux version (autofs, based
on Solaris iirc) much better than I like the BSD amd.

I do recall something about having shared mount points, but the trick
with it is always going to be dealing with namespace clashes.  What I
think would be neat is a filesystem and supporting daemon, the
filesystem permits multiple other filesystems to be mounted to the same
point, the daemon applies rules from a config file to deal with what
gets mounted where and how collisions are dealt with.

A couple of things I can think of; you could have a priority system
where clashing files from one system have a higher priority and are
therefore the ones that get mapped.  This would require some kind of
metadata stored about the files and tools to deal with that so you could
check where a particular file really lives for example.  Another
possibility is to mount each system into its own subdirectory, in the
case of a home dir this would require some way of mapping application
resource files and so forth so "vim ~/.zshrc" still makes sense.

Does anyone know how systems like CODA deal with this sort of thing?

-- 
Matt