If automount is setup properly, whatever mount point you're looking for will be there if you try and use it, even though you don't see it when not in use. If you're browsing the directory with a graphical tool, you may need to type in the name manually. Unfortunately not being able to choose from the available invisible mount points is probably the major drawback of autofs. If it really bugs you, edit the configuration files. (Hint, the ones that end in .c for "configuration")
The df command. mount with no options will do the same, plus show the options its mounted with.
This is not a problem with automount. As of this writing, the "auto" fs type does not attempt a vfat mount before it successfully mounts an msdos filesystem. VFAT is the Win95 and WinNT long filenames crammed into a FAT/MSDOS filesystem.
According to one of the authors of mount, since mount is only a wrapper around a system call which must specify the filesystem type, it's still the responsibility of the user to come up with the fs type. Having mount take a list of filesystems to try in order, rather than the current "heuristic" is under consideration. I'm sure that if anyone wants to go to the effort of finding the owner(s) of the mount program, your comments would be welcome. So for now this means that you can't mount vfat unless you give up the ability to autodetect all other fs's. Hopefully it will be fixed soon. In the mean time, feel free to create multiple mount points with different fs types specified.
/grumblesmurf is mounted and kill -SIGUSR1 won't unmount it.
It's being used by something. Root probably can't manually unmount it either. If you're the one who caused it to be mounted (i.e. it can't be someone else using it) look around for a shell that might be in that directory. If there are none, look for something else (particularly something that might have gone though that directory like a directory browser) that might have left an invisible foot in the door so to speak. If you've given up looking, try using the fuser program.
Not me. I didn't have anything to do with it. I just wanted to bring everyone's attention to what a great job had been done with autofs, and how easy it is to use. Compared to the original perpetrators of AMD (Hint, they sell an overpriced unice with prehistoric versions of free tools) the autofs is very well documented and the implementors have my sincere thanks. Everything is stamped copyright Transmeta so sorry I can't provide a credits list.
There's a autofs tutorial at http://www.linuxhq.com/lg/issue24/nielsen.html. See also am-utils at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~ezk/am-utils
(Thanks for these URLs)