Autodir is a modular daemon for creating directories transparently, based on autofs.
It is a thread-enabled tool to create and/or mounting and managing automagically and transparently user/group home directories, on demand. It can work with any authentication framework (e.g. system files, NIS, LDAP or SQL) and does not require PAM, which is a required feature for session-less service such as email servers.
Automounter version 4 (autofs4) has to be enabled when compiling the kernel. Debian packaged kernels have it enabled as module.
For more information, consult online docs at Autodir-HOWTO or the up-to-date version under the doc/docbook directory.
Note that in order to generate the HTML version of the DocBook documentation it is mandatory having xlstproc installed with required styling sheets. On Debian you need to install the following packages:
xsltproc
libxml2-utils (for xmlcatalog)
docbook-xml
docbook-xsl
docbook-xsl-ns