This article contains the procedure for upgrading autofs4 clients to autofs5. One good reason to do this is because autofs5 is a complete rewrite and it better handles lazy umounting and v5 actually respects the /etc/nsswitch.conf priorities, whereas v4 didn’t. You will also find that v5 has better support for “+” entries in local maps. If you’re running into issues where autofs won’t load certain mount points at all, an upgrade to v5 might be in order.
These instructions were used for CentOS 4.7, but should apply to all versions of CentOS
$ cd /
$ sudo service autofs stop
$ sudo chkconfig autofs off
$ sudo yum -y install autofs5
$ sudo chkconfig autofs5 on
$ sudo service autofs5 start
