autofs can do this. However, it does so trivially by creating a
symbolic link which is then traversed. This has mostly cosmetic
disadvantages, but a few more substatial ones. Any subprocess will see
the actual 'pwd' of /export/home/joeblow. Thus inexperienced users will
get confused and bother their system administrator, and, more seriously,
an application may wrongly determine the location of its private files,
defeating the 'logical structure' of the filesystem, and preventing
restructuring of the physical layout.
So the question is, how difficult would it be to make a fs implementation
that redirected requests for its top level directory to another fs'es
directory, and did all the necessary house keeping. Would it be possible
to just deal with the top level directory, or would all fs requests pass
through a layer of interpretation?
As you can tell by now, my knowledge of the linux fs internals is very
limited. I have merely scratched the surface of the linux source, but I
would love to learn and this sounds like something doable. From reading
some of the archives on this subject it seems like something others might
be interested in having.
Thanks for your comments (please comment ;-)
David
-- /==============================\ | David Mansfield | | david@cobite.com | \==============================/
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