Automounting USB sticks - questions

[Bruce M Simpson]

I got this working quite easily with the amd daemon.
Thanks to Alfred for your excellent work on this.  I wonder what the 
status of autofs is?

It would be great if we could ship FreeBSD out of the box, ready to 
automount removable media. This would be useful to all users, but 
particularly for novices and people who just wanna get on and use the beast.

Since the move to /media for a place to put removable mount points I'd 
imagine all of this gets a lot easier.

However I can understand there are real issues with this:

 * /etc/amd.conf. We don't ship one in /etc by default. Maybe we should?

 * /etc/amd.map. We ship one which contains defaults and nothing more. 
Perhaps commented out examples?

 * There doesn't appear to be a tool to tell amd about new maps at 
runtime. Is there such a beast?
   UPDATE: I just read code, and it seems SIGHUP can be sent, but this 
isn't in the man page and I haven't tried it.

 * devd doesn't have any hooks into GEOM, which makes it difficult to 
generate mount lines without retroactively parsing dmesg output. devd as 
I understand it sits on top of NEWBUS.
    Is there any way I can get a list of the disk devices, from 
userland, in the default install, which correspond to a given NEWBUS device?

 * I wonder if there's any way we can get a notification about media 
being inserted into a CDROM drive, without polling it?

I had a brief discussion online with phk@ about doing dynamic mounts, 
and it seems that there are still problems dealing with blowing away 
mounts when the device goes away.