[Samba] Problem mounting autofs directories

[Hosier, Kelli L.]

I'm having a problem getting Samba 3.x to handle my automount
directories.

Our data is on a HP server with 5 Raided disks. The disks are named
/vol1 through /vol5. Each disk has a directory named projects.data which
contains various project directories. I use NIS to indirectly automount
these directories under /projects on each client workstation. If a user
cd's to /projects, he only sees the directories that are currently
mounted. To get to a specific project directory he has to force the
mount by cd'ing to /projects/xxx.

I've set up a Samba server (version 2.x) to export the project data as a
share. Our Windows users map the K drive to \\eesamba\public. The public
share has path = /projects. Like the Unix users, the Windows users only
see directories that are already mounted in K:\projects. To force a
directory to mount, they can type K:\projects\xxx in the address bar of
Windows Explorer.

This has been working well for us for a couple of years now.

I want to upgrade our server to Samba 3.x to use Active Directory. I've
set up a test server with the same configuration as our production
server. However, I'm not getting the same behavior when it comes to the
project directories. If I cd to K:\projects, the server mounts ALL the
project directories in the NIS auto.projects map. Since we have over 600
project directories, this takes 5-10 minutes, during which time Windows
Explorer is unusable.

I've tried creating a directory of symbolic links to the project
directories on the Samba server but the Samba server still mounts all
the project directories as soon as I go to K:\projects.

I'm working with HP boxes running HPUX 11.i. The production Samba server
is running HP CIFS A.01.08 which is based on Samba version 2.2.3a. The
test Samba server is running is HP CIFS A.02.02 which is based on Samba
3.0.14a

I would greatly appreciate any help on this matter.

Kelli
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Kelli Hosier 
PTDS Electrical CAD Support
Northrop Grumman Electronic Systems, Baltimore, MD
Phone: (410) 993-7416
Email:   kelli.hosier at ngc.com