Thanks for a very useful article ("Troubleshooting Automount").
However, automount still resists my attempts to get it working, and I suspect something is broken.
This all started because users were complaining that Fonts in their network home directories were not accessible. After some trouble shooting, I discovered that user's fonts were only accessible fpr the first login after a reboot; subsequent users logging in will not be to use the Fonts in their user space. (They will be able to see ~/Library/Fonts, and rw there, but Fontbook won't recognize them and neither will anything else.)
At that point I decided perhaps an Automount /Library/Fonts directory could achieve the same results. I created the automount as described here. It is visible upon the first reboot and login, but subsequent logins show only a broken alias in /Network/, even though all of the troubleshooting steps above check out fine. (except the automount terminal method - it returns "-mnt: no such file or directory")
The interesting thing that upon subsequent reboots, it also shows the broken alias, unless I delete /private/automount/Network/Library by hand. Then /Network/Library works (but only for the first login session).
This is really driving me nuts. Any thoughts?
Both client and server are running 10.3.6, and are connected via a gigabit switch.