OK, speaking of gooses, I've discovered the goose is me. I've just spent an hour testing and retesting, trying to recreate the problem! Quite exasperating. So I went back to previous versions of fstab, finally digging up an old internal IDE drive from a previous laptop, to find what I'd somehow changed and hadn't realised I'd changed.
So: I use plug-in USB drives here and there (especially when rebuilding/ rescuing my workstation or [re]installing a box). To this end, I create fstab entries on occasion for my USB backup drive, in particular, normally with an "auto" mount option to speed up my reboot and rescue cycles. My brown paper bag moment (I was evidently not quite as rigorous in my one-change-at-a-time methodology as I thought I was) is my failure to add "noauto" or "comment=systemd.automount" to my USB rescue "automount". Twice now I've discarded entries in the thought that they were not relevant. This is not so cool, but anyway, problem found. Bit too late now, but I ought to have advised myself to attach a full fstab file, and someone probably would have seen it straight away. Thank you for assisting me on my wild goose chase. I'm now found so we can close this bug... Now, to discover if fstab somehow applies to the ls problem on my eee. Thanks Zenaan -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org