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."

Comments

Gigabit Ethernet

[m0rph3us0]

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.).

Real-world caps

[Andy Dodd]

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)