So I've been spending the past few hours trying to figure out how to get automounting working when I should have been in bed with my wife. So I'll drop off a question and come back to it whenever it is that I'll get up, and hope there are some answers.

First of all, my understanding of automounting is when the disk goes in (or when it's needed) it's mounted. When I hit eject, it at least attempts to unmount and eject. I'm speaking mostly of CDs here.
I've looking into how to make it happen quite a bit. I thought autofs is the best bet, since I just upgraded to a 2.6.9 kernel yesterday, and noticed the autofs module is included. I managed to find an autofs script (now in /etc/rc.d/rc.autofs) from this thread. But from what I understood from that thread is, after setting up say, auto.rd as in his example, the cdrom's path would now be /mnt/rd/cdrom. Why the change? And is there a way to keep it the same old /mnt/cdrom?

What I basically need is a quick walkthrough of what should go in the auto.master and auto.* file(s) to make this all work. I have a CD-RW/DVD, CDROM and a floppy, and kernel 2.6.9 as I said above.

I've run into supermount too, which seems to be exactly what I want, except I can't find a patch for 2.6.9. Or rather, I did, but for 2.6.9-ck2 which confuses me even more.
Is this the patch I need, or is there another one?

I use autofs to mount an usb camera and a nfs share

cp /usr/doc/autofs-3.1.7/samples/auto.misc /etc
cp /usr/doc/autofs-3.1.7/samples/auto.master /etc

auto.master :
/misc /etc/auto.misc

cat auto.misc :
olympus -fstype=auto,users,uid=501,gid=100 :/dev/olympus
sites -fstype=nfs,rw,rsize=8192,wsize=8192,hard,intr server:/home/web

So after /etc/rc.d/rc.autofs restart, the settings are taken in account
after that, when I cd /misc/sites the nfs share is mounted and when I cd /misc/olympus, the
usb camera is mounted (whith an help from udev to create /dev/olympus).

Does the included 2.4.26 kernel support autofs?

Yes as modules, autofs or autofs4.