http://www.adamsinfo.com/linux-device-names-mounting/

Recently I came across an annoying issue. I have three identical Seagate USB mass storage devices, plugged in to a debian etch 4.0 stable (2.6.18) machine. I could add those devices and mount points to /etc/fstab, but upon reboot, the /dev/sdX device names would change and therefore the drives would get mounted in the wrong place and bad things would happen. To summarize, “drive1″ would appear as /dev/sdb on one boot, but on another boot, “drive1″ would appear as /dev/sdc with “drive2″ appearing as /dev/sdb.

There are two options here, use the drive serial numbers and some UDEV trickery to ensure that a particular drive gets the same device name each time, but I wasn’t so sure about that.

Easier, just label your partitions, using: e2label /dev/sdb1 DISK1

Then from then on reference the drive label “DISK1″ in your mount. For example in /etc/fstab, replace: /dev/sdb1 /media/usb1 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0 with LABEL=DISK1 /media/usb1 auto rw,user,noauto 0 0

Now the same drives get mounted in the same place each time, and their dependants such as rsync, samba, etc are now working happily.

You can use mount /media/usb1 and it will automatically locate the correct /dev/ device node with the correct labelled partition!

I hope this is helpful!

Hasso Tepper has committed Sascha Wildner’s port of FreeBSD’s devinfo(3) and devinfo(8), for “ userspace access to the internal device hierarchy".  Hasso also updated acpi_battery(4), for battery monitoring.

He's also ported devd(8) from FreeBSD, with an inital patch for testing.