Well, you can't do anything which is specific to which user has logged in until, er, the user has logged in. That cannot be until the system moves to whichever run level provides a login prompt which is generally after the boot scripts have finished.

The straightforward way to do it is for the user to initiate it at login -- from shell startup files or alternatively, if graphical, from the desktop's autostart system.

Permissions have to be addressed. sudo could be used. I think it can be used to allow one user read-wite mounting and others read-only mounting.

If you really, really want to do it in the boot scripts the rc.local could start a background shell (thus allowing itself to terminate and the boot process to complete) which sat in a loop (delayed, so as not to use al the CPU!) looking for user logon/logoff and mounting/un-mounting as appropriate. Not nice -- synchronous solutions are a lot more efficient and robust than this type of asynchronous solution.

There may be more elegant solutions that I am not aware of.

I tried using the autostart feature for my desktop environment manager (xfce) but at the time I tried it, the network interface came up way later than the desktop autostart routine. I have since removed Network Manager and the network interface is coming up way earlier now (commands to mount network resources in fstab and rc.local are now working) so I may give this option another go.

Thanks again for your input catkin.