I've never found time to focus on this topic, but I believe it is very important. I discovered automount purely by accident. It wasn't until I removed NIS that I learned that automount required NIS. I seem to recall that it does (did) not work with NIS+, or something like that. I'm trying to get all this straight in my head. What are the various options available in SuSE 9.0 as regards NIS, NIS+, Automount, NFS, etc. I.e., what versions and variants are available, and how do they work together? What are the advantages and limitations of each? What kinds of security is available with each? Can the entire data transfer be encrypted? How. Can the authentication be encrypted or PKI based? I know I could probably formulate more coherent questions. I'm just trying to get some discussion going. I know LDAP, DNS, and DHCP can also play into this topic, as can IPv6. STH