You do have a /usr/local directory to mount it on, right? (I think you do, from my reading of your post).

Yep.

Are you trying to mount it from a shell, or from a preinit script? [...] You're not assuming that the default init does "mount -a" (it doesn't), are you?

I tried from a shell, where it worked, then from a pre-init script, which didn't. It was this last assumption that I wasn't aware of. Now that you and Peter have jogged my memory, though, I didn't have my mount preinit script ahead of my empacman preinit script. That'll fix one problem.

Thanks,