Automount USB drives in Debian

For a while now, removable drives were not automounting on my Debian box. I could have sworn it worked at one point but couldn't really figure it out. So I manually mounted the drives after I plugged them in. This grew tiring fairly quickly...

Manual

It is pretty easy to manually mount usb drives, provided you can figure out which device is being used.. To figure that out run dmesg.

desktop:/home/matt# dmesg
...
usb 2-1.2: new full speed USB device using address 9
scsi6 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
  Vendor: Generic   Model: USB Storage-MSC   Rev: 320A
  Type:   Direct-Access                      ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Attached scsi removable disk sda at scsi6, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
USB Mass Storage device found at 9
...

The key is to look at the Attached scsi removable disk [device] at ... line. In my case the device is sda, so to mount the drive..

desktop:/home/matt# mount -t vfat /dev/sda /media/usb

Well that worked pretty well but was infinitely more painful than windows. Note: sometimes I needed to use /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2.

Automagic

I use GNOME 2.1.. so these instructions are probably a mix of GNOME specific and system specific findings.

1. Make sure Removable Drives and Media preferences are set properly. Look in Desktop--| Preferences--| Removable Drives and Media. The GUI is pretty self-explanatory.. check the boxes that you want to auto-mount.
2. Make sure the userid is in the plugdev group.

My downfall? #2! At some point I must have whacked the groups by accident. Once I added my userid to the plugdev group (and logged out and came back in) automount was working like a champ!