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Article: Firewire Now
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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Networking
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