Why does it not work?

We're attending a 4 day course, Red Hat Rapid Track Programme. Being in the technical line, we're accustomed to stuff not working even when they should. Apai's automounter wasn't working. NIS login was working but the system was not mounting the home directory residing on NFS. We compared configurations, he rebooted, he redid, he ended up like this..

The problem? Permission for /etc/auto.guests was executable, while it should not.