autofs appears to be started before it is truly functional

[Mark Russell]

Binary package hint: autofs

Description: Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS
Release: 10.04

Installed: 5.0.4-3.1ubuntu5.1

Brief summary: autofs, in upstart terms, becomes "started" before it is actually ready. There seems to be a brief window immediately after "started" where if you run something expecting to be able to read or write to an automounted directory it will either fail (on a read or a write to a subdir of the mount) or write to the empty mountpoint (on a write to the root of the mount). Even though `status autofs` is "started/running" the mounts aren't ready.

If you sleep for a few seconds in the post-start script it covers up for the bug in most cases (probably) but the exact number may vary by system.

[Mark Russell (marrusl)]

You can work around this issue by adding this to the end of /etc/init/autofs.conf:

post-start script
    sleep 5
end script

[Clint Byrum (clint-fewbar)]

There are two issues here. One is that the package appears to fork before it is actually ready for things to automount. Because of that, we don't have a clear point which we can emit the started event. So either a patch should be made to have it fork later (unlikely) or we need a post-start that looks for evidence that automounting is ready to be used and blocks started until that condition is true.