Starting with Samba 3.0.25, mount.cifs automatically tries to add the prefixpath option under some circumstances when mounting cifs filesystems, even if the version of the cifs kernel module is too old to recognize the prefixpath option. The only way that I've found to get automount to work on CentOS 4 is to use drive names of the format sambaserver:/homedir, and the attempt to process and add the prefixpath option breaks this format.
Without prefixpath how could you have done mount \\server\share\directory\subdirectory before? It sounds like you are not any worse off when the user space mount has added prefixpath but the kernel hasn't (the kernel would have ignored the prefixpath mount option in both cases)
I do understand this driver name sambaserver:/homedir Is it ://sambaserver/homedir And if the kernel does not handle mount option prefixpath, it would not matter whether cifs mount helper passes down this mount option or not, it would be ignored but then with this kernel you can mount a share with directory or subdirectory under the share, autofs or not. So I am not sure what is broken, is homedir now treated as a prefix path and that is a problem on CentOS 4? If so, is this still an issue that needs to be resolved?
I think with newer version of autofs (autofs5?) on CentOS (4.7?), the format ://server/share should work with cifs. I think server:share is more like nfs syntax that is being used for cifs. Let us know if this is still an issue that needs to be worked on.
no response ... seems to be fixed. reopen if still problem