One of my users complained today that automount for USB devices wasn’t working on his machine (running Debian etch). I did a little light Googling, & came across this article on the subject.

Which seemed horrendously complicated for something that (surely?) should Just Work out-of-the-box. Hmm. Messed around a bit with the suggestions there, but to no avail.

Further googling produced this blog post which suggested a much more simple solution - add the user to the plugdev group. This worked like a charm. My thanks to Matt!

I note in passing that this is one of the downsides of central auth - the “emergency” local user is automatically added to this group (& also part of the audio group), but Kerberos/LDAP users unsurprisingly aren’t.