USB automounting advice

[patman]

I have a slightly different USB automounting question. At least, I think it's different. I've looked at autofs and I don't think it does what I'm looking for.

I have a machine here that has seven USB ports, between onboard and an attached hub. All seven ports work fine, no issue there.

Here's the deal - the people using this machine are going to walk up to it and plug in a variety of USB devices. Sticks, cameras, hard drives, CD-ROMs, et cetera. When these get plugged in, I want the system to automatically mount the device(based on order inserted - i.e., if it gets recognized as /dev/sda1, mount to /mnt/usb1) and then broadcast the mounted location to console.

This sounds to me like a job for a hotplug script, but I'm having trouble finding a place to help me write one that'll work for this.

So, am I on the right track? Is a hotplug script the best way to go about this? If so, where to learn how to write one?

And if not, what direction should I be going in?

[amightywind]

I use USB with a flash drive and printer. Like you I use fstab or the little programs that allow you to mount filesystems. The printer is coldplugged. I will be eager to see an authoritative response for this one. What happens when you pull the devices? Do their /dev files disappear too?
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amightywind