Getting autofs working on a Centos NeCTAR vm

So I have to set up a web server on a NeCTAR vm to allow public access to some research data that is sitting on RDSI storage in the QCIF UQ node. The node support team requested that instead of just NFS mounting the data storage to the vm, it would be preferable to use autofs to mount the filesystem.

I'm not a sys-admin type - mostly my linux environments are all set up for me so this was a bit of an adventure. I had quite a few problems so, with the aim of helping out future non sys-admin types in the same position, I thought I should document what I had to do.