Windows XP firewire network in your home

Firewire promises 400Mbps of bandwidth over short distances for small networks. HomeNetHelp’s brief firewire networking technology article can be found at here, and one about firewire networking with Windows ME can be found at here .

Building on their experience with firewire networks in Windows ME, Microsoft has added IP over Firewire to Whistler. Any 1394 (firewire) cards in your system will be comfigured like a standard network adapter. When I installed Whistler, it automatically set up a network connection for both my firewire card and Ethernet card. Firewire networking appears to work even smoother than it did in Windows ME. I am not going to quote speeds because Whister is in beta, but I think we can expect to see amazing speeds in the final version given its 40Mbps capacity.

We tested firewire networking between two Windows XP machines and Windows XP to Windows ME. All my tests were successful and ran without a single glitch. It was as simple as plugging in a in a cable then exploring the network neighborhood. Since IP over firewire is now an IEEE standard, interoperability with other IP over firewire operating systems should also be successful.

 

Quick note on other firewire hardware:

Plugging in a a Pyro based Firewire hard drive worked flawlessly. I simply pluged in the drive and it instantly appeared as a drive letter. No extra drivers to load, no reboots, nothing. Nice and clean

Part 1: Introduction

Part 3: IP Alt Config & Firewalls