[CentOS] Autofs cannot bind LDAP server

Fri Nov 27 17:30:30 UTC 2009
Eric B. <ebenze at hotmail.com>

Hi,

I'm using Autofs and LDAP for mounting my home directories via nfs.  In 
general, everything seems to work fine.  However, I have one small problem. 
If I reboot my server using autofs while my LDAP server is down, I get the 
following error message in my logs:

 automount[3358]: bind_ldap_anonymous: lookup(ldap): Unable to bind to the 
LDAP server: (default), error Can't contact LDAP server

which is understandable, since my ldap server is temporarily down.

My problem, however, is that once my ldap server is back up, autofs never 
seems to retry to connect to it, so all my /home mounts fail.  Basically, it 
means I have to make sure that my LDAP server is never down while another 
server is rebooting.

I figure there must be something in the configuration file that would allow 
me to tweak this to indicate to autofs to recheck the ldap server 
periodically to see if it has come back up, but can't seem to find anything.

My /etc/sysconfic/autofs file is pretty plain:
# TIMEOUT - set the default mount timeout (default 600).
#
TIMEOUT=300

# LOGGING - set default log level "none", "verbose" or "debug"
#
LOGGING="verbose"

# Other common LDAP nameing
#
MAP_OBJECT_CLASS="automountMap"
ENTRY_OBJECT_CLASS="automount"
MAP_ATTRIBUTE="ou"
ENTRY_ATTRIBUTE="cn"
VALUE_ATTRIBUTE="automountInformation"


Is there anything I can do to force autofs to check to see if my LDAP server 
is back online?

Thanks,

Eric