Apologies in advance for excerpting or leaving out the messages sent to the list as i was in digest mode so got them all in one lump. Rudi Ahlers: You could assign a LABEL to each hard drive. The LABEL is attached to the drive's UID (I think?) so even if you move the drive to anther port it will still be accessible via the same LABEL > Unfortunately, the removable devices are utterly random and rarely if ever the same device seen twice. > Kind Security Advisors, i appreciate the potential issues resulting from not upgrading. These systems are behind VPNs, so out of reach other than from within a secured environment. They are not production systems per se - i consider them more as appliances and that necessitates a certain hands-off-it-works approach. If gives any relief, front-facing production systems i manage _are_ patched up to the earholes. However, i will take your advice seriously and look into the logistics of performing remote security-level patches without breaking something irreparably. > Lamar, thank you for your comments. My suspicion is that bus enumeration is the source of the initial device ordering - a similar thing happens when installing a secondary NIC, which sets itself up as eth0/eth1 ahead of the onboard NIC ports if they haven't; been preconfigured. I'm sure you've all read about that issue. However, I'm not aware of any way to alter the order of enumeration. Module load order appears to occur further down the chain - or does it? I have this synopsis of rc.sysint: http://www.comptechdoc.org/os/linux/startupman/linux_surcsysinit.html and will see if it's possible to get my array statically mounted before all of the dynamic stuff licks in. thanks, all! If anyone has any ideas that aren't security related ;) please feel free. - cal