USB handling in Mandriva 2009

[viking777]

A bit complicated this so bear with me or look away now!

 

At the moment I am using 2 gprs/3g modems to connect to the internet. I need to hot swap these two in order to find the one that has the best connection. I have managed to do this with the help of a udev rule that I found on the internet. It works well, but it has a side effect that it removes access to my external usb hard drive. It does this because it invokes the command

rmmod usb_storage

This is acceptable to me because at the moment, the ability to hot swap the modems is more important than the ability to hot plug my hard drive. If I want to use the hard drive I have to rename the udev rule and then run

udevadm control reload_rules

.

 

However I have noticed that on 2009 the situation is a little different. I am running the same udev rule but it is not affecting my hard drive in the same way (which is a big bonus for me). The hard drive has two partitions, one is ext3 the other is ntfs. In 2009 the ext3 partition seems to be recognised and mounted automatically and I am able to mount the other partition with the 'pmount' command. The other noticeable difference is that whilst on 2008.1 the two partitions are shown as '/dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdb5' on 2009 they are called '/dev/uba1 and /dev/uba5'.

 

I can only conclude from these differences that 2009 is handling usb devices differently from 2008.1.

 

Am I correct in this assumption? If so is there some explanation around as to what the differences are?

 

Hopefully one that my feeble brain can comprehend