Greg Whynott wrote:

typically we'll put an entry into auto.master similar to:

/n yp auto.local

I've done this on the SuSE machines in the lab and we are seeing 'odd' behavior.

Unless there are massive changes to the autofs scripts between 9.0 and whatever version you're running, you need to take a look at all the manpages for the automounter. This line in auto.master tells autofs to create an automount with mountpoint /n using mapfile yp, with option auto.local applied to each entry in that mapfile. See man auto.master; it is just a coincidence that this line yields a valid commandline for automount. In particular, there is no "n directive" for auto.master.

after starting autofs via the init script, two atomounters are running:

/usr/sbin/automount /n yp yp:auto.local /usr/sbin/automount /n yp auto.local

The second of these is started as per above. Everything in auto.local will be mounted under /n with a map-type yp (ie. a NIS database). I am not yet sure just why or how the first one is started. It is certainly unclear where that yp:auto.local is coming from. The autofs startup script isn't very easy to follow. What is the result of running: ypcat -k auto.master 2> /dev/null I can tell you that the autofs script should not start up that first automount instance unless this command has a non-null return.