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Cross-Platform Firewire Networking at Home?
Stahnke asks "I have two computers that I need to exchange data between. I do music-production on a Windows-based system and have everything else on a Linux system. I need to exchange HUGE amount of data (5GB at a time sometimes) between the two systems as fast as possible while clients are waiting for me. 10/100 Ethernet is too slow, and fiber is just too expensive. Can Linux (2.4) do Firewire networking with a Windows machine? If so, how, and what tools are out there? I have a Firewire card working in Linux, but I haven't had luck with TCP/IP via Firewire yet."
Perhaps if this is not possible, in the way of direct network connections, a halfway point may be worth considering. As firewire's hot-pluggability is a feature, go for a medium sized firewire drive that can be used purely for transporting files
Admittedly it's not quite as neat a solution at first glance as just firewire-cabling between two machines - but it sounds as good an excuse as any to buy an iPod!
Three Words: Firewise Drive
You might like to have a look at fibre channel. Not sure of the extent of support in Linux, but Windows has it already supported (as you'd imagine).
Fibre channel is expensive but notable due to higher %age usage in real-world use. The max throughput on Ethernet (you refer to IP) is somewhere between 30% and 50%, whereas fibre channel can realistically get up to about 80% usage. So, on a 1Gb card, that's not too shabby.
Anyway, others will have better hands on experience but it might serve as a useful alternative avenue to explore.
Aegilops
I would seriously look at gigabit networking. a) its faster, b) it will work. currently there is no standard for the medium the transmits your IP packets so it is unlikely for two IP stacks to work over IEEE 1394. If you can't afford the price of two gigabit nics I would wonder how much your clients time is really worth. (btw, you dont need a gigabit switch because you can use a cross-over cable.).
Although not strictly relevant to your question, I feel the need to point out that if you had Apple CPUs with built-in Firewire, you could do exactly what you're asking for. To wit: by restarting one in "FireWire Target Disk Mode", which involves simply restarting and holding down the "t" key, that unit's HD will appear on the desktop of another Mac just like any other externally mounted FireWire HD would.
Depending on how much you need this feature, you might consider a "switch"--why not use the tools that provide the features you need?
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$tar -xvf
Note that these will all likely be capped to 35-40 MB/sec if you have IDE drives, maybe a little bit more for 7200 RPM SCSI.
So far I've found the 1394 networking support for Linux to be pretty slow... For some reason it seems to put the interface into 100 mbit/sec mode.
USB2 can't even come CLOSE to theoretical max throughput. I have a combo USB2/1394 drive enclosure. In 1394 mode, hdparm -t gives a result of approx. 23 MB/sec. In USB2 mode, the same benchmark gives a result of 12 MB/sec. (For a 64MB sustained read)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
yeah, but both OSes need to know who's reading and writing to the disk at a given point in time. You'd still need some kind of volume manager software, and they're expensive (in comparison to the hardware).