More or less. You load ieee1394.ko, ohci1394.ko and sbp2.ko, and a scsi-style device appears for each disk.
Right. Nowdays I'd expect this sort of thing to happen automatically due to hotplug etc.
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.
Indeed. I twiddled with my setup to get it to name my wireless card correctly. It kept getting names like dev1234 (where 1234 would change every boot). Made setting up a network tricky. Now it appears the wireless drivers I use can be given a module option to fix the device name.
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)
Indeed but very flexible, which is good.
This is almost happening. Ethernet connected disks (ATA over Ethernet, www.coraid.com) as a cheaper alternative to iSCSI.
Indeed I've read about Coraid gear. Very nice. Presents the ATAoE device as a block device to the Linux kernel. Has some limitations though due to its simplicity.
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 :)
Yeah. I'm occasionally tempted to get a NAS. But often they are more expensive than they should be. Ie, you could build a simple Linux NAS a lot cheaper than the off the shelf ones. Regards -- Oliver Jones » Roving Code Warrior oliver(a)deeperdesign.com » +64 (21) 41 2238 » www.deeperdesign.com