Ok, I want to see if anybody has experience with or opinions relating to my "problem". I say problem only in the sense I want to make life easy and idiotproof for a couple of my periferals.

First of all, I'm running Slack 10.0, kernel-2.6.7 on my desktop machine and am 99% satisfied with it's current state. I can do everything I want and have grown very attached to Slack. One issue is lingering though.

I currently have a PCI firewire card for the sole purpose of charging/syncing my Ipod which I do very easily with GTKPod. I followed the instructions from their FAQ and have the Ipod automount/dismount with no problem. I have an entry in my fstab as such:

/dev/sda2 /mnt/ipod vfat rw,users,noauto 0 0

When I put my Ipod in the cradle, I run dmesg and see the ipod is recognized life is good.

Problem arose, though, when I recently decided to load some files from my thumbdrive. (I use thumbdrive loosely, I actually just have some old MMC cards from a former mp3 player that can only really be used for small off-computer storage with the addition of a $7 usb reader, but same principal) I read a bunch of posts about how to mount/dismount the thumbdrive and run the modprobe usb-storage to read the media, it worked, and I thought I was good. At the time, I didn't have my Ipod plugged in and when I plugged it in, I found the problem.

I read how Slack basically mounts these as scsi drives in order that they are detected. I.E., my Ipod was sda2 and this worked in the fstab when I only had one scsi drive (pseudo scsi) attached. So when I had both thumbdrive and Ipod attached, the first became sda2 (or sda1) and the other would be sdb1 (or sdb2) which would confuse things wihin fstab and when trying to mount the drives.

Now, this isn't a problem if I just choose to have a disciplined approach to always making sure my Ipod is connected before the thumbdrive thus making the Ipod sda2 and thumbdrive sdb2. I've tried this, it works, and I can live with it. But my question is this, is there a way for me to set it up so that I don't have to make sure one is connected for the other to work without all of the manual mounting/umounting?

Like I said, I can make both drives work now but I'm looking to elimate the dependency of sdb2 to have sda2 mounted. Thanks in advance.

IMHO
Repartition your thumbdrive so that it goes to /dev/sdX3.
in that way you can add two lines in your fstab for each devices. Example:

I am sure alternative methods is available.