I am using Ubuntu 12.04, and am trying to use NIS with AutoFS to mount the NFS shares I have access to for projects. I can mount my networked home directory, which is used for the remote terminals, but this is owned by my user. Project directories I allocate are owned by root, but are in a group I am in, and on the remote terminals, configured by IT, I am able to mount those with autoFS too (simply by naviagting to their directory). I get access denied when I run automount in the foreground.
Here is where I believe the issue is: I have been working on getting PAM with Kerberos working to log into the network user, but have not yet suceeded. So I am using a local user with the same name, UID, and GID as the NIS user. When I check its group membership using id, my local user says it is in the group that owns the project directory, which is not in my local /etc/group file. I was led to believe I could automount these directories without logging in to the network user, if I chose not to install kerberos.
All of this would be a great question for corporate IT, except they do not support Ubuntu 12.04 officially. They encourage using it, but I don't have high hopes that they will give me any support for anything except the RHEL and 10.04 images that they distribute pre configured.
Edit: I noticed that the directories I can mount have rwxrwxr-x permissions, whereas the one I cannot has rwxrwx--- permissions. So when my local root goes to mount it it does not have permission, I would guess. But I do not believe it is possible to run automount as my user, which has permissions for that directory.