webcamd and device numbering

[Da Rock]

I've been struggling with this on my own for ages now, and I was 
determined to try and sort it myself. But I'll now eat my humble pie and 
ask for some help :)

I have (I believe I have mentioned this before) 5 dvb tuners in a 
FreeBSD server (8.2): 1 cx88, 2 DiVico dual tuners (that totals 4 
amongst just the DiVico's). I'm using webcamd to use these (thank God I 
can get away from Linux!), and they work fine except I have to run ln -s 
to link them to the right places after every reboot (Only the Divico's 
use webcamd). So they should look like this:

$ls /dev/dvb/
adapter0    adapter1    adapter2    adapter3

instead:

ls /dev/dvb/
adapter0    adapter16    adapter24    adapter8

This is a real problem because 1. MPlayer only accepts 0-4, and 2. 
GStreamer (including xine) only accept 1-16.

I tried working out how to resolve the issue any sane way; and then I 
resorted to some quick hacks. I tried uding devfs.rules for links before 
I found out it can't do that at all. devfs.conf is no good, as it sets 
them up to begin with. And running some commands in rc.local didn't 
work: `ln -s /dev/dvb/adapter8 /dev/dvb/adapter1` and so forth.

I googled and googled and there seem to be no real fix as webcamd won't 
work without hal and relies on it for the numbering (but borks it 
continuously). I've tried updates and so forth, but all to no avail. I'm 
not too worried about a permanent fix because hal's death bells have 
tolled, but I do need to fix this as it is really getting annoying now - 
the server is on continuously but can go down from time to time and 
catches the unwary :) (like when a scheduled recording which requires 
say adapter1 finds it no longer there)

I'm using webcamd-3.2.0.2, which I recently updated.

Cheers