I run a computer services business and I recently switched from Windows Server 2003 entirely over to my linux box. I do backups of customers hard drives by mounting them via ieee1394 and up until the switch to my linux box I had never had any trouble in W2K3 with firewire devices.

The issue I ran into on the linux box is that my kernel isn't re-scanning the bus when I unmount one drive and plug in another. A reboot always fixed it.

I tried to d/l and compile gscanbus, but that project is sort of old and it doesnt compile due to incompatibilites and old code.

I finally worked out a solution and I would like to share it with everyone in-case some of you experience the same problem I *had*. I hunted down and got rescan-scsi-bus.sh

It solved all my problems. I now simply unmount /dev/sdb1, power off the firewire enclosure, put the next hard disk in, fire it up and run (as root) rescan-scsi-bus.sh. Then I simply mount /dev/sdb1 and i'm golden.

Link to the script...
http://www.errorsect.com/files/rescan-scsi-bus.sh

your approach works for 2.4 but 2.6 also has a more advanced approach via 'udev' which even allows to have for a specific device always the same blockdevice, this also works for usb devices.

udevinfo -a -p /sys/block/sda

shows the properties you can use to recognize a specific device.

regards,

tlowk