USB Stick Automounting on RHEL

USB sticks are not automounted on my nice Scientific Linux (RHEL) 5.x desktops. Why not?

gnome-volume-manager should do the mounting — but it's not running; gnome-volume-manager requires hald to be running, but it's not; in turn this requires the message bus, dbus.

/etc/rc5.d/S22messagebus has failed — even though there exists /var/run/messagebus.pid with the appropriate time-stamp.
/etc/init.d/messagebus start fails as /var/run/messagebus.pid exists, but /etc/init.d/messagebus restart works.
Then /etc/init.d/haldaemon start works and gnome-volume-manager will start too — normally it starts as part of a gnome-session.
Life is too short to figure out why the message bus won't start, though Googling suggests that some RedHat-based systems have problems with the message bus when LDAP authentication is enabled (owing to the order in which services are started being duff).

Simply add a workaround — in addition to /etc/rc5.d/S33messagebus we add

    /etc/rc5.d/:

      S97messagebussimonh -> ../init.d/messagebussimonh

where messagebussimonh is a modified version of the original, in which start now does a stop first:

 
    start() {

        #### BEGIN ADDED :
        #
        echo -n $"Stopping system message bus: "

        killproc $servicename -TERM
        RETVAL=$?
        echo
        if [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then
            rm -f /var/lock/subsys/$servicename
            rm -f /var/run/messagebus.pid
        fi
        #
        #### END ADDED.


        echo -n $"Starting system message bus: "

        if [ -x /bin/dbus-uuidgen ] ; then
            /bin/dbus-uuidgen --ensure
        fi

        daemon --check $servicename $processname --system
        RETVAL=$?
        echo
        [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/$servicename
    }

    stop() {
        echo -n $"Stopping system message bus: "

        ## we don't want to kill all the per-user $processname, we want
        ## to use the pid file *only*; because we use the fake nonexistent 
        ## program name "$servicename" that should be safe-ish
        killproc $servicename -TERM
        RETVAL=$?
        echo
        if [ $RETVAL -eq 0 ]; then
            rm -f /var/lock/subsys/$servicename
            rm -f /var/run/messagebus.pid
        fi
    }

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USB Stick Automounting on RHEL