We've just set up 3 Dell systems with 64 bit Red Hat Enterprise Workstation 5. As part of our system configuration we point the user authentication to our LDAP server, and automount people's home directories from our fileserver. At this point, our security people do some configuration and we get it back.

We are typically running KDE.

On all three machines, when you plug a USB stick into the system, the familiar window pops up asking you what you want to do - open the contents in some program, open a file viewer, etc. and the stick shows up in /media

When you stick a CD or DVD into the drive nothing happens - you don't get the options window and nothing appears in /media

I'm trying to get an idea of how the automount process works, and where I may have stepped on it.

We've got three more identical machines that haven't been installed yet, so my plan is to check the ability to automount CDs at various stages of our setup process.

See if the line is commented out in /etc/auto.master
if it is not, look in /etc/auto.misc for this line
ans restart autofs

Both my RedHat 5 and Suse 10.3 systems have the /etc/auto.misc file with the cd reference, but neither have the /misc entry in auto.master.

The problem is that the SuSE system successfully automounts both CDs and USB sticks into /media and the RedHat system only automounts USB sticks.

The /misc line works like an "include" line as far as I know. I am not too familiar with Suse and it may have some other mechanism. I would try adding that /misc line in the RHEL machine and restart autofs and see if that works.