Enable “browse” mode with RHEL autofs

At $WORK I had a requirement to have all autofs mounts in NIS show up as directories in the filesystem. This means that if you have a NIS map called auto.data file that mounts everything under /data/sharename that sharename has to be visible, even if it’s not mounted. This allows users to have a list of all possible NFS automounts.

In Solaris the default behavior is to make all these mount points visible but in RHEL 6 (and Centos I’m sure) the default is to have this feature disabled. Which means unless a mount is active it’s not visible in /data.

This behavior can be controlled by the BROWSE_MODE=”yes” setting in /etc/sysconfig/autofs. Once this is set just issue an autofs reload and your automounts will populate with their mount directories.