IEEE 1394 Networking

rabix · Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 7:41 pm Post subject: IEEE 1394 Networking

Hi all.
I am running a small home network between a number of PC's. Currently i have a PC running Gentoo with both a firewire (ieee1394) and standard 100Mb network card. I would like to be able to plug my laptop directly into my PC's firewire card in order to acess the internet and network. (The switch is too far away to justify installing a new network cable). Anyone have any idea of how to achieve this. If there is already a post dealing with this topic could somebody point me there. Thanks

tomthewombat · Posted: Tue Jul 13, 2004 8:49 pm Post subject:

if you compile the right module in your kernel, then you should be able to modprobe eth1394 and then configure it just like a normal ethx network interface.
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rabix · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 7:56 am Post subject:

Thanks for the reply.

Excuse me for being a complete idiot but how do i accomplish this (without messing up eth0) and allowing the two to communicate together and share the same IP address.

tomthewombat · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 1:28 pm Post subject:

I'm sorry, but that is a bit out of my league. I know it mentions setting up multiple network interfaces in the Gentoo install docs. You need to give both the ieee1394 connections internal ips on the same subnets. (ie 192.168.x.x) Then configure the laptop to use your desktop as a gateway. Tell your laptop to use the same DNS host your desktop uses. The desktop can just route all the traffic between them.

As for howto do the actually routing between eth0 and eth1 on your desktop, I am unsure. I know you will need IP chains.. or whatever the new system is.. compiled into your kernel. Maybe someone else can help you out.
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Petyr · Posted: Thu Jul 15, 2004 3:53 pm Post subject:

Check out some of the firewall scripts that are available. I'm not exactly sure if you can make an firewire connection act like a NIC, but who knows. Anyhow if you're able to get the Firewire card to have an IP, then you could tell something like Shorewall about it and that you want it to do routing for that card. Just check out the masquarading options, or you could even set it up so that it's on the same IP subnet as the rest of your network, which (assuming you allow shorewall to do this) would mean the computers on the network would be able to see the laptop as well (as opposed to just your desktop computer being able to see it).

Best of luck, lemme know if it works!

Petyr Rahl

syadnom · Guru Joined: 09 May 2002 Posts: 531

these firewire links are tcp/ip over firewire, and they do not do netbios. just pure tcp/ip. so you can use them like a NIC but don't expect to resolve samba names accross the link as they are on netbios.

if you use their IP it works fine. eg. //192.168.x.x/sharename

also, 10/100, specifically the 100, is 12.5MB/sec(100Mb / 8bits/byte) and firewire400 is 50MB/sec without netbios overhead. you can get a realworld speed of about 20MB/sec which is better than the 5-6MB/sec from ethernet.

but remember the limitations of being TCP/IP ONLY.

Sm1 · Posted: Mon Mar 28, 2005 3:42 pm Post subject:

Is it at all possible to run a DHCP client over firewire? From what I have seen dhcpcd doesn't want to pick up an ip address from a ethernet over firewire network, however a dhcp server can be run on it.