Killing the automounter

Do not terminate an automount process with the SIGKILL signal (kill -9). Without an opportunity to unmount itself, automount's mount points will appear to the kernel as belonging to a nonresponding NFS server. The recommended way to terminate automount services is to send a SIGTERM (kill -15, the default signal) to the daemon. This allows the automounter to catch the signal and to unmount not only the mount points associated with its daemon, but any mounts in /tmp_mnt. Note that any mounts in /tmp_mnt that are busy will not be unmounted.

To kill the automounter, do the following:

1. Find out the automount's process ID (PID) number by entering:
   
   ps -ef | grep automount

   The second field contains the PID number.

2. Enter the following command:
   
   kill pid

   where pid is the automount PID.