I am running Fedora Core 4, which I keep up to date, sometimes (such as this time) much to my sadness. I have been using hal and fstab-sync to automatically update my fstab file, which worked fine. Recently I updated using yum and installed a newer se-linux policy and hal package. Now nothing will mount without root privilages. Everything else works fine- the devices are detected, directories are created, and fstab updated in what seems to be identical to previous to the update. Even when I change the fstab entry to contain nothing but owner,auto,exec, I still cannot mount other than via root. There are no messages via dmesg or messages that indicate anything new. I have upgraded the hal package to something more bleeding edge out of Rawhide, and nothing has changed.

Anyone have any experience along these lines?

This was me! I did some hacking in the process of testing out encrypted partitions and in the process patched mount to give it the ability to mount encrypted loop devices (aes-loop). Since I am not going this route for this solution, a download and force install of the util-linux package, which contains mount, solved this problem.

Sorry for the bother!