Exporting automounted partitions via nfs

Last modified on July 24, 2026 • 1 min read • 184 words We are accessing data from our server via nfs. The nfs exports are automounted on the nfs clients’ computers. It works fine. However there is a partition (a whole drive in fact) on our server that is automounted on demand. We wanted this hard drive to unmount automatically if it is not needed to save energy and reduce noise levels. When I include the mountpoint of this partition in /etc/exports everything seems to work fine, but automounting this export on a client machine fails. It can still be mounted manually though with a regular mount command. As a workaround (in order to have a desktop link in KDE to the data on the server) I did the following: I added an entry to the fstab: server:/automounts/multimedia /media/multimedia nfs rsize=1024,wsize=1024,noauto,user 0 0 Then I created a shell script: !/bin/sh mount /media/multimedia kfmclient openProfile filemanagement /media/multimedia Then I created a new “Link to Application”, that points to that shell script. As a result of clicking this Link, the nfs export is mounted and a new Konqueror window opens with the contents of the mountpoint directory displayed.