Every time I copy data between my desktop and laptop, I think about how it would be faster if my laptop had gigabit ethernet. I have a gigabit switch and an onboard gigabit NIC on my desktop, but the laptop is slow old 100BaseT. However I do this rarely enough that shelling out 30 bucks for a gigabit PC card would be a waste of money (I could buy a NDS game for $30!).<\/p>\n
Then it occurs to me that both computers have firewire, and I have a firewire cable. I know you can do networking over firewire, but does it require a special cable? Out of mainline kernel drivers? Nope and nope. It’s this easy:<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
On each computer:<\/p>\n
$ sudo modprobe eth1394\r\n\r\n$ dmesg | grep eth1394\r\n\r\n[ 2829.651634] eth1394: eth1: IPv4 over IEEE 1394 (fw-host0)\r\n[ 2829.652104] eth1394: eth2: IPv4 over IEEE 1394 (fw-host1)\r\n\r\n$ sudo ifconfig eth2 192.168.XXX.Y broadcast 192.168.XXX.255 \\\r\n netmask 255.255.255.0<\/pre>\nWhere 192.168.XXX. is a local network block not already in use, and Y is 1 on the first machine and 2 on the second. If you have multiple firewire host cards and ports, you will get multiple ethernet devices. I plugged the cable into my Audigy, which I guessed correctly was the second host, so I used eth2. I then shoved these commands into $HOME\/bin\/fweth.sh on each computer so I can start it up quickly next time. The eth device numbers should be the same every time if you don’t have any other dynamic network devices. I then added entries to \/etc\/hosts so I can ssh\/unison\/scp without typing the IPs.<\/p>\n
Preliminary experiments suggests the connection is screamingly fast. Great success!<\/p>\n
Note: I’m pretty sure eth1394 has been in the mainline kernel for a long time, and most distributions likely include the module in the default installation. I’m using Ubuntu Hardy with stock kernel, 64-bit and 32-bit on desktop and laptop respecitively, and no tinkering was necessary. Also a word of warning: according to the linux ieee1394 faq, eth1394 is “neither stable nor fully standards (RFC 2734) compliant–but getting close!”. YMMV.<\/p>\n
Windows XP and Mac OS X also have firewire networking, but I’m not sure how well they interoperate with each other and with the Linux version. I’m curious to know if anyone tries it.<\/p>\n
UPDATE: I installed sidux and upgraded to kernel 2.6.27, and eth1394 stopped working – the interfaces were not even created. It turns out that the new firewire subsystem does not yet include a port of eth1394, and sidux blacklists the old system in favor of the new by default. Editing \/etc\/modprobe.d\/ieee1394 accordingly and loading ohci1394 fixed the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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