any administrator on any machine in their enterprise could access available software updates under /software/updates. A user on a Solaris system would find the Solaris compiled packages under /software, while a Linux user would find RPMs, DEBs, or other packages for their particular OS version thereunder. Moreover, a Solaris user on a SPARC workstation would have his /software/updates mapped to an appropriate export for that system's architecture, while a Solaris user on an x86 PC would transparently find his /software/updates directory containing packages suited to his system. Some software (written in scripting languages such as Perl or Python) can be installed and/or run on any supported platform without porting, recompilation or re-packaging of any sort. A systems administrator might conceivably locate such software in a /software/common export. In some cases, organizations may also use regional or location-based variable/dynamic mappings — so that users in one building or site are directed to a closer file server which hosts replications of the resources that are hosted at other locations. In all of these cases, automounter utilities allow the users to access files and directories without regard for the actual physical location. Using an automounter, the users and systems administrators can usually access files where they are "supposed to be" and find that they appear to be there. Software Tom Lyon developed the original automount software at Sun Microsystems: SunOS 4.0 made automounting available in 1988. Sun Microsystems eventually licensed this implementation to other commercial UNIX distributions. Solaris 2.0, first released in 1992, implemented its automounter with a pseudofilesystem called autofs, which communicates with a user-mode daemon that performs mounts. Other Unix-like systems have adopted that implementation of the automounter - including AIX, HP-UX, and Mac OS X 10.5 and later. In December 1989 Jan-Simon Pendry released Amd, an automounter "based in spirit" on the SunOS automount program. Amd has also become known as the Berkeley Automounter. Linux has an independent implementation of an autofs-based automounter; version 5 of that automounter generally operates compatibly with the Solaris automounter. FreeBSD used to provide Amd; starting with 10.1 it has a new automounter very similar to the Solaris one. It has been subsequently ported to DragonFly BSD and NetBSD. Some operating systems also support automatic mounting of external drives (such as disk drives or flash drives that use FireWire or USB connections) and removable media (such as CDs and DVDs). This technology differs from the