multihomed NFS automounts.

[Jeremy A. Rosengren]

Sorry for the detail, I want to make sure my question is understood :)

At the office, we use NIS automounts extensively.  Quite often, we'll 
have the same data mirrored in multiple offices, located in different 
physical buildings.  The automounter in Solaris supports multihomed 
automount maps, so that a client machine will try to mount the closest 
server (ie, on its subnet) first before trying others.  For example:

#ypcat -k auto_project
project1	fileserver1,fileserver2:/vol/vol0/data/project1

To make autofs in Fedora Core < 2 support these multihomed mounts, an 
ex-employee wrote a patch to the nfsmount code in util-linux that does a 
quick check to determine the network response time of the server, and 
then mounts the server with the lowest response time, the assumption 
being that the lowest response time means the server is on the same 
subnet as the client machine, or at least is the best mount candidate.

As of FC2 + util-linux-2.12a from rawhide (used to support sloppy 
mounting of mounts with unsupported options), I'm no longer able to 
rebuild util-linux with the patch.  The NFS4 patches to util-linux seem 
to conflict.  util-linux-2.12, included in FC2, seems to pick the first 
host in the list and mounts that, even if the first host is the furthest 
away from the client.

Question #1:  Does anybody know if multihomed NFS automounts are a 
feature destined to be included in future versions of util-linux?

Question #2:  Would anybody be interested in the patch we have that was 
easy to apply to util-linux-2.11y but doesn't seem to work out of the 
box with 2.12a?  The ex-employee did try to submit the patch to the 
upstream maintainers, but never received a response from them at the time.

Question #3:  Is this really supported and I just didn't find the magic 
incantation?

Thanks,

-- jeremy