Auto Mount NAS Network Drives with AutoFS in Ubuntu

autofs is a tool for automatically mounting directories when they are needed. I find that this makes it ideal for using with laptops on my WiFi network to access my NAS, that had difficulty keeping static mounts via fstab when they hibernate. Auto-mounts are mounted only as they are accessed, for example when you cd into the mounted directory and they they are unmounted after a period of inactivity.

How to Setup autofs on ubuntu 22.04

Install autofs on ubuntu with apt

sudo apt update
sudo apt install autofs

use a text editor to edit the config file /etc/auto.master and append a reference to a new file that we will create to the end.

vi /etc/auto.master/mnt 

and add this line to the end of the file.

/etc/auto.nasdocs

create the file we mentioned above

vi /etc/auto.nasdocs

and put in our auto mount statement, where nasdocs is the new local mount directory name that will be created inside /mnt and the directory on my NAS drive that we are mounting is 192.168.11.10:/volume1/nasdocs

nasdocs -rw 192.168.11.10:/volume1/nasdocs

read changes

service autofs reload

test it by listing or changing into the directory

ls /mnt/nasdocs

Further Reading

There is a more detailed guide hosted on ubuntu Wiki Autofs – Community Help Wiki (ubuntu.com)