/Volumes is special. It is owned by Autofs. Even root doesn't have full control over it because it is already managed by root via Autofs.
You're mistaken. /Volumes is owned by root:admin. AutoFS is irrelevant. I should be able to define a folder as a mountpoint wherever I'd like as root, and mount a filesystem there. It's that simple. Sheez... non-root users can perform this function! root can't even mount a filesystem with mount_smbfs regardless of location of the mountpoint!! This is repeatable on multiple machines, with both Lion server and client.
Why do you need root for that?
As I said, the goal is a system-level launchd job that runs on a schedule with no user logged in. Those, as far as I can tell, by definition run as root.
Ah! I love commentary.
Glad to hear it. Your's is pretty ripe and invigorating, too.
There is no reason you need root to manually mount something on /Volumes to backup some other machine. It would be better to have the other machine login as un unprivileged user on the Mac and back itself up.
The "other machine" in question is a Win 2K8 box.
Look, I came here asking a simple question. Ignore my goals. They are clearly irrelevant to you, and if you'd perform the task at hand differently, that's fine. The long and the short of it is that if you try to run mount_smbfs as root in Lion, it will fail with an authentication error. It doesn't matter where the mountpoint is. Try it. Now, come back and give me a good reason why the root user can't or shouldn't be able to use mount_smbfs just like any other user.