Using the automount facility

The automount facility automatically mounts file systems at the time they are accessed. It manages the creation of the mount point and the mount of the user file system for you. Whenever someone accesses a directory managed by the automount facility, the mount is issued automatically.

Using the automount facility provides the following advantages:

It is easier to manage file systems. You do not need to mount most file systems at initialization. You also do not need to request that operators perform mounts for other file systems. It is easier to add new users because you can keep your parmlib specification stable. You can establish a simple automount policy to manage user home directories.
Resources are not consumed until they are requested. A file system that is managed by the automount facility remains unmounted until its mount point is accessed.
You can reclaim system resources used by a mount if that file system has not been used for a period of time. You can specify how long the file system should remain mounted after its last use.

You can use the automount facility for the zFS and HFS file systems in addition to other file system such as NFS.

Restriction: If you are using system-specific security labels, do not use the automount facility.