I've never gotten Firewire to work. Though I've not tried hard. I actually don't even know how the Linux kernel treats firewire devices. Is it just like USB Storage systems?
More or less. You load ieee1394.ko, ohci1394.ko and sbp2.ko, and a scsi-style device appears for each disk.
FC3's hotplug/udev support is quite nice. Sure the device order can change but it always mounts the drive in the same place. It uses the filesystem's volume label to name the mount point too. Eg my 200GB drive is always mounted as /media/SWAG as it's VFAT volume label is SWAG.
yep. I think udev finally got things right in a way that devfs could never quite manage. My USB stick is keyed off its serial number. Some of the udev examples are kind of contrived, but show up the flexibility. One of the more contrived examples is to do a cddb lookup on audio cds as they are inserted, and to mount them as /dev/$artist_$album (well, to symlink that to the actual device name anyway)
Yes it could be any of these things. On the whole, quite annoying. But I survive. Personally I wish we just used Ethernet for everything. At least that works flawlessly. Everything should be connected to the network. Sun's (now cliched) slogan of "The Network is the Computer"
This is almost happening. Ethernet connected disks (ATA over Ethernet, www.coraid.com) as a cheaper alternative to iSCSI. Also, you can get a fairly wide range of SOHO/home user "NAS" devices that you plug USB or firewire disks into, and it "just works" and then presents them as samba or NFS share. There are "media centers" along this line as well. Although, they are probably all running linux of some form underneath the covers, and might exhibit just as many problems as you've seen :)