LinuxQuestions.org - IrDA and USB configuration on laptop and port replicator

Hello again!

Thanx a lot for all hints and advices - this site is really great and very useful!

As the subject of my post says, I would like to ask all members about their experience in configuring USB ports and IrDA ports under SuSE 9.1 Pro. The compuet is IBM Thinkpad 600x with 450MB RAM and PIII 450 MHz CPU.

(1) 2 USB ports - recently I bought a port replicator for my 600X (ordinary "SelectaBase" from IBM). It has a USB port, and my notebook has another one. So, I would like to reach both of them at the same time. In my /etc/fstab-file I have an entry which mounts /dev/sda1 file to "/usb" mount point. Besídes, in /etc/fstab-file there is a row saying:
usbfs /proc/bus/usb <something more>
Both entries were made by a friend of mine, who helped me in the very beginning with initial configuration (when I had no replicator and only 1 port). Yesterday I created another mount point "/usb_dock" and tried to mount my USB port from replicator to this point. Unfortunatelly, I failed.
Can anybody give me a hint, how I can reach the replicator's port? I think, there must be a device in /dev folder, which must be mounted (like sda1 in my case). But I don't know which device...

(2) IrDA - this is another nightmare... Under Windows my IrDA port works perfectly - it recognizes another notebook placed nereby, it recognized my cell phone Nokia as mobile modem, etc. But when I try to use it under Linux, I fail. When I include "irda" service in the list of services to run on runlevel 5 (which I use), it gets started, but my battery dies in 30 minutes (usually it holds ca. 1.5 hr). (And I don't now how to send files to another notebook or how to receive them).
When I removed "irda" service from the list of services for auto-start, and tried to start it manually, I encountered the following:
- a) IrDA manager - rcirda - works under root only;
- b) I could start IrDA - by "rcirda start" - but only once. When I tried to restart it after regular stop - by "rcirda stop" - it returned "failed" (although "rcirda stop" returned again "OK").
Use of the cell phone is never considered so far, because I don't know hot to control IrDA.
So, my questions are:
- can anybody give me hints about proper configuration of IrDA service - I want to be able to start this service manually as ordinary user, to send files to and receive them from another notebook;
- does anybody know about good Linux-application (with GUI), which helps to work with IrDA: establish connections, send/receive files, etc...

I think, that's all so far. Again, thanx a lot for all hints I got earlier. I appreciate your help and hope for some informative replies for this post either.

Regards and best wishes from white and cold Hamburg,
A.