Although I’ve got persistent device naming etc. configured, I’m still hoping to fully grasp & master the needed configfiles for udev, hal etc. So I found a few links (lots of overlap but hey):
- HAL and device management
- A Linux Planet tutorial : Adding additional hard drives in Linux
- An ok article on the horrible sys-con website : Device Management with udev and HAL on Fedora Core 4
- The recent state of udev
- HAL reverse engineered (@opensolaris)
On a sidenote, the annoying bug in Ubuntu Hardy Beta (causing new mount dirs to be created in /media with appended underscores) appears to have been fixed. Time to install some more (92 in fact) updates 
Update: I forgot to add a nice PDF from Linux Magazine on the subject : Dynamic device management in udev