The background: Several months ago, one of our MacOS X 10.2.x remote server volumes could no longer be unmounted from some of our Jaguar clients. Mounted volumes from this server could only be removed by logging off or restarting. A hint from the excellent 'Mac OS X Unleased (2nd Ed)' by John Ray and William C. Ray suggested AUTOMOUNT may have been the cause. AUTOMOUNT is active by default, but can be deactivated in the /etc/hostconfig file. I deactivated AUTOMOUNT using the pico text editor by entering: sudo pico /etc/hostconfig and changing AUTOMOUNT=-YES- to AUTOMOUNT=-NO- and saving and restarting. This solved the unmountable volume problem and browsing the LAN worked under Jaguar.
Installing Panther broke my network browsing. After struggling with the lack of this feature, I recalled my changes to hostconfig. Again using pico, I edited hostconfig and changed AUTOMOUNT back to the default -YES-. After restarting, network browsing again functions under my Panther installation. Apparently, network browsing is implemented differently under Panther, and AUTOMOUNT must be active for it to function.

