autofs problems

[splat]

i'm having some trouble getting autofs to work on one of my gentoo 64 boxes. I've got autofs v4 compiled in to my kernel and followed a guide online to set it up. I';ve used that same guide before, so I know it works. One of the problems is that I have --ghost set, but i am not getting any gosted directories. The other problem is that if i try to browse to the directory as if --ghost was not set, i get the "no such dir" error. below are my configs:

/etc/autofs/auto.master

/mnt/auto       /etc/autofs/auto.auto     --timeout=60 --ghost

/etc/autofs/auto.auto

#directory name                        options for mount                              device to mount
 #boot                                   -fstype=ext2                                   :/dev/hda1
 cdrom                                  -fstype=iso9660,ro                             :/dev/cdrom
 floppy                                 -fstype=auto                                   :/dev/fd0
 #storage                                -rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft,timeo=30,rw        192.168.0.7:/home/storage
 #portage                               -rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft,timeo=30,rw        hydra.localnet:/usr/portage
 smb1                                   -fstype=smbfs,rw,credentials=/etc/smb.auth     ://mediabox/hd1share
 smb2                                   -fstype=smbfs,rw,credentials=/etc/smb.auth     ://mediabox/hd2share
 # SMB example
 #some-win-smb                          -fstype=smbfs,credentials=/etc/smb.auth        ://some-win-host/path/to/smb
 # NFS example
 #some-nfs                              -rsize=8192,wsize=8192,soft,timeo=14,rw        some-nfs-host:/path/to/nfs

 # An example with wildcards, see autofs(5):
 #*                                     -fstype=iso9660,ro,loop                        :/images/&.iso

/mnt/auto is present and ready. and i've got /etc/init.d/autofs added to default. and like i said, i get no errors, so I have no idea whats going on.