[KLUG Hardware] Firewire?

[Bruce Smith]

I never touched a firewire (IEEE 1394) device of any kind before today.

I now have a external disk drive with a firewire or USB connection.
I plugged the firewire cable into my laptop, turned on the power to
everything, Redhat 9 booted and discovered the firewire device.  Then 
I was able to use the disk drive as a SCSI device.  Very nice.

This seems function very similar to external USB mass storage devices.
My question is:  Is usability the same?  i.e.:

Can I [un]plug firewire devices on a running system?  Is there something
like USB's "hotplug" program to detect and load drivers for firewire?
Or do should I shutdown before plugging/unplugging firewire cables?
Any other differences between firewire & USB I should know about?

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Bruce Smith                bruce@armintl.com
System Administrator / Network Administrator
Armstrong International, Inc.
Three Rivers, Michigan  49093  USA
http://www.armstrong-intl.com/
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