Fun with Firewire

November 26th, 2003

Rob (and maybe jim and becky) will probably be the only ones that give a shit about this. everyone else will probably go “yah, that’s great” and never think about it again, but that’s ok.

i was messing around with my dv cam today, and i had the idea (this isn’t the first time) of hooking up two computers with a firewire cable. I was pretty sure it could be done, but i had never tried it for myself. apparently, you CAN network computers with firewire. it will let you assign an ip address to the 1394 connection on each computer. so i assigned an ip to each one, and then tried to reach it over the firewire “network.” amazingly, i could see each of the computers’ shares from the other one. i did a 50MB file transfer just for the hell of it, and it took a little less than 4 seconds. that’s faster than a 100baseT LAN connection.

so here’s the new idea. setup one machine that has a firewire port, and a NIC, and use it as a router. then have the rest of your network firewire with a firewire hub etc… how cool would that be? your LAN speed would be like 200mbps. it would only be 100mbps to the internet, but that doesn’t matter because most cable modems are only 10mbps, only the newer ones are 100mbps. so you’d lose no speed on your internet connection, and your LAN connection would be twice as fast! and considering the fact that more and more computers are coming with firewire ports standard, this should be a relatively simple task. now linksys just needs to make a cable router that has an RJ45 WAN port, and a firewire ports for the computers. I am the smartest man alive!

in the unlikely event that anyone would like to know more, feel free to post a question.

in the immortal words of Wesley Willis… Rock over London, Rock on Chicago… Diet Coke.. Uh HUH!

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