This is showing up *hundreds of thousands of times* in the syslogs, and is causing out automounter daemon to take a 50-60% of the CPU across hundreds of workstations, if not thousands and filling disks with syslog entries. Our exports are:
/ -root=server2:server3 /home -root=server2:server3 /builddir -root=server2:server3 /vol/vol1 -root=server2:server3
Note that /vol/vol1 does exist.
It might be that some automounters can't cope with that - the problem may be that "/vol/ is not a valid syntax for filers", and the automounters in question try to mount "/vol", fail, and complain - but it's also possible to have e.g. a UNIX box with "/foo/bar" and "/bletch" exported but with "/foo" not exported, which might look the same to an automounter, although the error it'd get back from the server when it tries to mount "/foo" might be different from the one it gets from trying to mount "/vol" on a filer.
It'd be interesting to tweak the "amd" source to see why it fails to mount "/remote/ronco/vol/vol1", and to see what operations it's trying to do and which one fails.
But that'd ultimately be an automounter problem, not a pure filer problem with "/vol/<volume name>/XXX" vs. "/XXX". I think Jim Davis had a one-volume machine, in which case his export list wouldn't have a mix of those two types of pathnames, so I wouldn't expect an automounter to trip over that.
So, I read on the NOW site what I have pasted below. The second to the last paragraph is what seems to stand out to me - "If you use paths of the / form for export points in the root volume, the automounter might not be able to mount directories in other volumes,
...which shouldn't apply if you don't *have* other volumes...
or it might create new directories in your root volume to serve as mount points."
...which presumably means that if it mounts "foobar:/" on "/net/foobar", and mounts "foobar:/home" on "/net/foobar/home" (not necessarily a pointless exercise, if the options checked at NFS-operation time, such as "ro" and "rw=" and "anon=", are different for "/home" than for "/), it'd try making a "/net/foobar/vol" directory, and a "/net/foobar/vol/vol1" directory under it, to mount "foobar:/vol/vol1".
If so, that also shouldn't apply if you don't have other volumes.