somebody wrote:
>> >     More common: you turn of one of your disks/tapedrives. 
>> >     Are you going to renumber the remaining ones?

Probably completely separate from the issue of PCMCIA devices:

Something I've long disliked about NetBSD is the numbering
scheme used to name disks (and tapes and many other peripherals).

Why is the first disk called "sd0" and the second disk "sd1"
regardless of SCSI ID or controller?  I think even a new naive 
user would understand that a disk on SCSI ID 4 is called sd4.

Why not use some unique identifier "XXX" for the controller and call
devices /dev/cXXXdID where ID is the actual SCSI ID?  Then if a
drive goes bad or if devices are moved and the system reboots the
fstab will still match.

We have HP systems at work which have two SCSI chains:  FWD for
the internal disks and SE for the external devices.  We attach and
detach CD-ROMs and DAT drives and occasionally disks from the SE
chain all the time.  Since HP assigns device names based on controller
and SCSI ID there are never any problems about using the correct name
for any particular device.  You don't even have to re-scan the SCSI
bus so the OS finds new devices -- you simply use them and it works.

I don't think I'd ever expect that I could take my /u1 disk, for example,
move it to a different SCSI ID and a different controller and expect
that any UNIX would automatically find it and mount it as /u1 by itself,
because I'm not sure that I'd ever really want that to happen anyway.
But I would expect that if a SCSI disk died and I reboot my machine,
that all the disks that are working mount in the correct place.  Now I 
know the device names can be "nailed down" for all the SCSI peripherals,
but I have three wide chains and that last drive would be called /dev/sd47
and I'm not sure that NetBSD can deal with that.

Just my two cents worth....

-- Chuck