autofs: keep devices permanently mounted

I have some ISO images which I use autofs to mount as loop devices.

For reasons that are not important I want them to stay mounted permanently.

I couldn't find any information online on how to do this so I poked around in the related autofs man pages.

I noticed that there is a time out option which is set by default to 600 seconds.

I wondered what would happen if I set that to 0 seconds so I tried it.

So far the devices in question have stayed mounted for 15 minutes

Here's how to do it:

/etc/auto.master
/mnt/loop /etc/auto.loops -t 0

/etc/auto.loops

* -fstype=iso9660,loop     :/store/ISO.archives/&.iso

The -t 0 is where we set the time out to 0 (infinite)

   

In case you are wondering the * at the beginning and the &.iso at the end of auto.loops will mount all of the iso files found in the /store/ISO.archives/ directory.