Slashdot Mirror
IP over Firewire Updated
foniksonik writes "Apple released an update to its IP over FireWire software. 'Now the IP over FireWire Preview Release adds support for using the Internet Protocol - commonly known as TCP/IP - over FireWire. ... Using the existing Network Preferences Pane, users can add FireWire as their IP network node to connect and communicate between two machines. ... In all cases, Rendezvous can be used if desired for configuration, name resolution, and discovery.'" Now it is time for YA debate on FireWire vs. Ethernet. Let the festivities commence!
this page, has plenty of info on tcp/ip over firewire.. w/ a quick read looks like length is the biggest problem, 2nd to no implimentation supporting more then 2 devices.
I guess this is kinda IP over serial SCSI?
-psy
Now all we need is some nice IEEE1394.b optical-connection switches! Oh yeah.
So how is this better than gigabit ethernet which is standard on most macs?
Is it just another way of communicating that perhaps allows one to avoid a congested/insecure ethernet backbone when connecting two neigboring macs?
what's the big deal?
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
someone make a pun
Generally, Gigabit Ethernet is more flexible, easier to maintain, and has more third party hardware available for it, but if you have a motherboard with FW and are setting up a special-purpose, low-cost cluster, IEEE1394 or USB2 networking may be a reasonable choice.
Several weeks after the JE was written, I am generally pleased with the technology because it solved one of my problem (need for a p2p network connection between computers on different LANs). The biggest disappointment I have is for performance which is not great (only marginally faster that FastEthernet and certainly not line rate), and high CPU utilization (both computers are sluggish when moving large files accross).
The JE is over 2 weeks old so comments are disabled, but feel free to post below for any comments/remarks....
IP over FireWire is most useful when the Ethernet port is in use (such as, on a server). Let's say you have a full-time web server, serving over its ethernet interface. Say you need to upload more content, but you can't take that ethernet port or that server offline. You can upload the content and let the ethernet continue to serve as much as it can. It's handy and you don't need a complex networking solution.
Also, consumer machines can have faster file transfers without shutting one machine down into target disk mode. I think it's supposed to be simple and fast, not scalable and fastEST.
I think it is a suppliment for ethernet.
For instance, by roommate has a laptop and a desktop but only one ethernet port, so he uses IP over Firewire to have both computers on the internet.
It is also useful if you need to connect two computers but you are already using the ethernet jack on one of them.
omnia tua castra sunt nobis
MacInTouch held this discussion a while back... Might be some useful info in there somewhere. Of course, this was just prior to 800mb FW.
uh dude get an ethernet hub.
Ethernet is dirt-cheap and everywhere, gigabit is backwards compatible. Game over.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
I'm hoping that they slide IP over FireWire in as a standard feature on Panther. I've been using it since January, and I must say that it is excellent. The speed isn't quite there yet, but it is good enough. By this, I mean that target disk mode still gives noticeably faster transfers, but this feels faster than 100mbps ethernet. (I haven't run numbers, sue me.)
For the people out there questioning "Why?", here goes. For machines with built in ethernet and no PCI slots, this is a godsend. I have my Cube and my TiBook on a little LAN using IP over FireWire and Internet Sharing. Since the Cube's ethernet port is dedicated to the network connection, the only other way I would have been able to do this would be AirPort, and this obviously blows that away for bandwidth. With AirPort, large file transfers would take forever, and I probably couldn't max out my connection. (Gotta love college hookups!)
This is just one of the many reasons why I love Apple so much. For all the things in OS X that get big press, there are so many little treasures such as IP over FireWire. Even for a preview release, it's pretty damn well polished. (Disclaimer: Many have complained that is has trashed prefs on install, but in two installs and two upgrades I've never had this problem.) Keep up the good work Apple, and make this a part of the standard install ASAP.
At the time when IEEE1394 was issued, the max cable length was 4.5m . Now there are many 10m cables. What is the actual maximum cable length for say 400Mbps? How does it compare with Gigabit Ethernet?
Since when has that been the case?
My late 2001 iBook has built-in FireWire, and it didn't ship with a FireWire cable.
And people wondered why there was a Firewire400 port on the front of the xserves.
I've been toying around with the new IP over Firewire and noticed something quite interesting. I've got my iBook connected to the second fw400 port on my DP1.25ghz fw800 MDD powermac. The first fw400 port on my powermac is used by my 30gig iPod. I installed the new release on both machines and when I had rebooted my iPod showed up on both my iBook and my Powermac. I don't know if this was Rendezvous, which I know is now implemented on the new release. I can see how this could be quite useful in a setting where an external Firewire device, say a DVD burner or HardDisk, could be easily shared between two computers.
"Fighting for peace is like fucking for chastity."
Something that cluster guys may want to think about is the use of Firewire 800 as a cluster media (like a control net) for a group of n xserves (or any other mac). This would be an alternative (since the FW800 is already there) buying a load of Cisco 4000 or 6500 switches to run the control net. I'm actually not sure how many nodes it can handle, but I assume it would be enough to run a small to medium mac cluster. Along those same lines, when testing the performance of FW400 between nodes using iperf ( http://dast.nlanr.net/Projects/Iperf/ ) which will test raw throughput and give very good results, FW400 performance was very poor. The GigE was pretty good (unfortunately I do not have the numbers in front ot me) but if I'm not mistaken, FW400 was a bit better than 100mb E and the GigE was pushing over 800mb UDP back to back with another MAC. Performance was degraded when adding a GigE switch between the 2 macs (due to backplane).
nb
This is a very good thing to come from Apple.
They are getting into higher-performance computing clusters, with the release of things like the Xserve Cluster Node that has two FireWire ports. FireWire provides HEAPS lower latency than ethernet, so to link a few cluster nodes together, and avoid paying big money for exotic low-latency interconnects, it's now all included.
- k
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
Ok, so it's not as fast as gigE but it makes one hell of a redundant system to daisychain round a few nodes. As a previous poster said, it will also take some bottleneck strain. There's the possibility of using it for LAN parties without half the hardware cost (if indeed it can be daisychained - and I can't see why not)The quicker this gets fully implemented, the better.
The only weird thing I can't figure out yet is how it mounts that other disk. All files are owned by the admin owner and you can't chown anything on the target macs disk, therefore if I backup /Users to it with "rsync -a", it requires later booting up the destination mac and "chown -R" each user's home dir. There must be a mount option somewhere to deal with this...
really nice for computers like my 12in PowerBook which only have 100T ethernet.
In testing, I've found FTPing over a FireWire cable has very lovely results.
Vonal Declosion
I have an ibook with a broken Ethernet port.
My options seem to be.
1) find a usb/ethernet adapter that works with OSX. (difficult because all macs seem to have built in ethernet.)
2) airport card, but I'm not sure how that would work with my current network (linux box as firewall/ipmasq )
but now this seems like a viable option. If I attached via firewire to the G4 would I be able to see the whole network or just files on the G4?
Huh? They used to support IP, now they support TCP/IP as well. I thought once you had IP working, included TCP/IP, UDP/IP, etc. Does this mean UDP doesn't work yet. Or is someone (me?) just confused by all these letters?
Don't forget the Fibre Channel option for the Xserves. If you need high-bandwidth between nodes on your cluster, regardless of money, that's the way to go.
Karma: Ran over your dogma.
IP Over Firewire has been really useful for me in a couple of situations -- most notably when I've needed to run backups of my main Macs. For day-to-day use, I stick to 10/100 though -- it's cheaper to implement, and I can crimp my own cables on a whim.
I've got a Shuttle barebones based Wintel system with built-in firewire and a pair of massive drives that I use for a rendering station/backup server -- and let me tell you -- backing up 130 gigs worth of DV footage/uncompressed TIFFs (insert pr0n joke here) over Firewire is one hell of a lot quicker than waiting for the same over 100mbps Ethernet. XP is slightly flaky when it comes to IP over firewire (no, i *don't* want those connections bridged!) but once you get it running it's a little more stable than your average house of cards.
I know a lot of photographers who swear by Target Disk mode as well -- they carry their powerbooks as preview stations and Big Honkin Memory Cards (using Firewire-connected pro cameras) and once they get back to their main machine to retouch, they just go into target mode and stuff dumps *fast*. Now if only I could get a kodak camera back to interface with my iPod......
All things being equal, I've been tempted to convert everything I've got over to firewire from the stock ethernet jacks -- but I honestly have better uses for a firewire port most of the time (DVD-R, DVcam, DVDeck, DV-to-component box, iPod), and I really prefer to rely on my router for connection sharing instead of the Mac.
Of course if THAT'S true then we can start speculating about what "device" they're coming out with that needs IPoFW. :-)
Cheers,
John
If your G4 has a internet connection you should enable internet connection sharing and then you will be able to use NAT (Network Address Translation) to access the net. Essentially your G4 becomes the network gateway/router and it will pass through your requests.
I want to make a similar connection between my OS X system and my WinXP system. I want each system to get their Internet independently from my router over the Ethernet, but also be able to talk to each other via IPoFW.
The purpose is to run Remote Desktop Connection or VNC to control the PC from the Mac environment at super high speed.
I've had the same problems with XP bridging the connections. Anybody have tips for how to get this done?
Others have suggested removing the Ethernet connection from the PC, and using the Mac to share internet over the FW, but ideally I'd like to be able to use the PC without the Mac being on if necessary.
No, you're thinking of I.P. Frehley, the brother of the guitarist from Kiss. Interesting thing - he's a network tech with a bladder control problem. Funny old world, isn't it?
What if life is just a side effect of some other process and God has no idea we exist?
Try setting the TCP Firewire connection on the PC to be on a different subnet than the ethernet (ie 192.168.1.xxx vs 192.168.100.xxx). That way you don't need to deal with connection bridging, etc -- the Mac's Internet sharing should handle the port forwarding properly if you enable it for the Firewire connection (should be en1 or en2).
You can also go in and hack around in the IPFW config (if youre so inclined), or use something like BrickHouse to edit the built-in firewall and port forwarding.
Basically with this, firewire would be its own subnet that would be bridged over to your Ethernet connection on the Mac so stuff like SMB will still work.
My best advice is *not* to let the windows networking wizard do a thing -- edit everything manually, and join the workgroup from your system control panel.
Best of luck.
I used VNC to run headless mac renderfarms. It runs like a charm.
It might be less complete or performant than solutions like Timbiktu or Apple remote desktop, but it is open source, free, runs over IP, is ported on all the platforms that you might want to use.
Search for VNC on Version Tacker.
the IP over FireWire Preview Release adds support for using the Internet Protocol - commonly known as TCP/IP
No, IP is just known as IP. TCP sits on top of it, but it's not the only one who can. UDP does too, and anything else could if you felt like it.
I know this is getting picky, but this is "news for nerds", so try to keep it straight.
company: macWireless.com
price $29
wow... the Apple Developer Connection web site seems to either developing extra-sensory perception, or doing some information gathering behind our collective backs. the bit that gave them away was this, on the first page i saw after logging in:
You currently have no assets.
well, damn! it's not bad enough that they're checking up on my financial status, but do they have to rub it in?
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
When this first came out a few months ago, I did a few tests, copying an 850 MB .img between two OS X G4s in various ways: (times are min:sec) (original thread over here)
TCP/IP over 10/100 LAN: 1:30
IP over FireWire: 1:50
FireWire with 1 Mac in target disk mode: 1:25
TCP/IP over 1000bT (straignt cable): 0:27
My conclusion at the time was "Slow, but potentially useful." Well, I have since found a use. I have a G4 here at work and recently bought an iBook. I put the (old) IP-FW driver on both Macs, gave them similar IPs, turned on Internet connection sharing on the G4, and poof! my iBook can access the servers and Internet without my having to request an additional network drop in my cube. I just leave a 6p-6p FW cable plugged into my G4 and draped over my desk.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.