firewire networking - ip over 1394 for your home network

Article: Firewire Now

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Networking Over Firewire

Firewire Networks

Read HomeNetHelp's article explaining FireWire Networks

 Two PC’s with Firewire adapters needs no other hardware to network. Firewire operates at 100-400Mbps and has little latency. Unfortunately, the 15 Ft limitation between devices may limit the possible uses of Firewire networks to small peer-to-peer operations.

Operating System Support

Currently, only Windows ME has native support for Firewire networking. When a firewire card is installed in a computer running Windows ME, a virtual ‘network adapter’ is installed in Network Properties. This virtual adapter can be configured with a specific IP address or it will create its own IP schema for the Firewire network automatically. WindowsME uses a standard called “IPv4 over IEEE 1394, Internet RFC 2734”. 

Unibrain’s FireNet

Unibrain manufactures Ethernet emulation software called FireNet. Instead of limiting networking over Firewire to IP, Firenet allows you to network with any Ethernet protocol like IPX, Appletalk, and NetBeui (and IP of course). Firenet’s product is easy to install and appears in your Network Properties (windows) as a network adapter. FireNet runs on Windows 2000 and Windows98/98SE/ME. Unibrain also has a version for the Macintosh. (look for a full Mac and PC FireNet review in January 2001) 

Benchmarking Firewire Networking

These benchmark numbers show the actual throughput that can be expected when transferring files between computers. The results are in Mbits/Second.  

Benchmark Computers:

1 P3-800 Computer, known as server

1 P2-350 Computer, known as client

The tests performed involved FTP’ing 70Mb test files from the client computer to the server computer. The client and server computer were tested with Windows ME and Windows 200 Professional operating systems in a dual-boot configuration. WFTPD 2.41 FTP Server was run on the server and the clients ran the command line FTP client built into windows.

100Mbit Ethernet benchmarks were also performed for comparison. The Ethernet cards were connected to a 10/100 switch and were in Full Duplex mode.

These results clearly illustrate the superiority of Windows 2000 Professional over Windows ME. Firewire operates over twice as fast in Windows 2000 over Windows ME. FireNet performs so well in Windows 2000 that Firewire Networking outpaces 100Mbit Ethernet. According to Unibrain, Firenet performs even better with multiple clients – reaching into the 200Mbit/second range

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firewire networking - ip over 1394 for your home network