Mounts

A mount connects a remote file system to an engine host's local file system at the OS level. This allows DCT and its compliance engines to access remote files and directories as if they were local.

Mounts are managed through the DCT API. There is currently no UI in DCT to create or manage mounts directly.

Mount types

DCT Compliance supports two types of mounts:

NFS and CIFS mounts

NFS (Network File System) and CIFS (Common Internet File System) mounts are used with VM-based compliance engines. You create these mounts through the DCT API and specify the remote host name, path, and mount protocol.

DCT manages the lifecycle of NFS and CIFS mounts on the engine. When a compliance job runs, DCT passes mount information to the engine in the job sync bundle. The engine temporarily mounts the remote file system for the job duration, then cleans up the mount after the job completes. The mount record in DCT persists for reuse with other jobs.

External mounts

External mounts are used with containerized compliance engines running in Kubernetes. Unlike NFS and CIFS mounts, external mounts are mounted by Kubernetes from outside the container, not by the engine itself.

The containerized engine discovers external mounts automatically. DCT pulls mount information from the engine every 5 minutes to track which mounts are present and their health across all nodes in the orchestrator. Once a mount is pulled into DCT, you can use it in file connectors just like NFS and CIFS mounts.

External mounts must be set up at the same local mount path on every node in an orchestrator before any compliance job runs against them. If a mount is only partially set up across nodes (present on some but missing on others), compliance jobs may succeed or fail randomly depending on which node is selected to run the job, making behavior appear unpredictable. In the same partial-setup scenario, operations such as test connection, fetch file names, and ruleset file metadata updates can also fail because they require a compliance node selection.

Mount lifecycle

NFS and CIFS mounts: DCT manages lifecycle. You create the mount once, then reuse it across multiple jobs. Temporary mounts are created and cleaned up automatically during job execution.

External mounts: Kubernetes/engine manages lifecycle. DCT discovers and tracks them but does not create, modify, or delete them through DCT APIs.

Using mounts with file connectors

When you Create a file connector, you can select a mount as the connection method. DCT displays available mounts that match your engine's configuration. You can test the connection to validate connectivity before creating the connector.