I have an old Asus eee PC 1011PX with a dead screen (that I have removed.)
lshw returns ... Qualcom Atheros AR8152 V2.0 Fast Ethernet for the network chipset.
"and perhaps a auto service that will monitor the states of the devices every few seconds and mount/remount when needed."
Well if the chipset for the eeePC could be made to work with Snakeoil I would dedicate that machine to Snakeoil and be able to set that as ' OS drive as the first boot device' so no need for mount/remount... :-)