Perhaps the lack of interest is a result of there not being an urgent need for the technology. It seems that network infrastructure, including cabling, routers, switches, stand-alone-gateways, etc, are the most reliable things in the computer industry. With today's reliability ethernet is pretty much hot plugable and indestructable.
The technology hasn't gone anywhere, its still there.
Install a mac with OS X Server and it will ask whether the firewire port should be used for ip etc.
Firewire has many limitations opposed to ethernet.
There is a maximum 5m cable length and you only are connected to a single machine directly (well max 63 machines I think according to the IEEE spec). You don't want to have serial technology nowadays when a 4 port Gigibit switch costs $100.
On a normal network card I can support multiple protocols a higher speed (1Gb) and be connected to a switch.
I can install a 10Gb network card on a mac and have even better performance.
I can install a 10Gb network card on a mac and have even better performance.
That's great, but try that on an iBook, PowerBook, eMac or iMac.
That's right: it's not possible. You will have 100 MBit or at most 1 GBit Ethernet built-in, but you will also have 400 MBit or maybe even 800 MBit FireWire. For the iBook, which has 100 MBit Ethernet, but 400 MBit FireWire, clearly the latter is the better choice.
Besides, for an ad-hoc solution, FireWire is far superior. You don't have to think of cross-over cabling or how to structure the topology. You just connect. The limitation to 63 devices should be fine for any medium-sized computer room, and in between rooms, you could still bridge through 1 GBit Ethernet.
Btw, on Windows XP Pro, I can easily bridge between FireWire and Ethernet IP networks - any decent way to get that working on Mac OS X?
I use firewire networking a fair bit. My main home network is wireless (mostly laptops) - so for transferring big files, I just plug in a firewire cable. I don't even need to config anything - they automatically use the firewire if it's there.
With any Mac capable of running OSX, I don't believe you have to worry about cross over cables for ethernet. The port in my iBook detects whether it needs to cross-over or not.
rrabu: this is not true. For example my 450Mhz Cube is perfectly capable of running all versions of MacOS X and it does not have an autosensing ethernet port.
The only statement you can be sure of is if you have a gigabit ethernet port then you know it is autosensing.
Comments
Perhaps the lack of interest is a result of there not being an urgent need for the technology. It seems that network infrastructure, including cabling, routers, switches, stand-alone-gateways, etc, are the most reliable things in the computer industry. With today's reliability ethernet is pretty much hot plugable and indestructable.
Originally posted by Altivec_2.0
Where has this technology gone?
Why would you want his? Gigabit Ethernet is very affordable nowadays. And to link together two Macs you only need a cable!
Install a mac with OS X Server and it will ask whether the firewire port should be used for ip etc.
Firewire has many limitations opposed to ethernet.
There is a maximum 5m cable length and you only are connected to a single machine directly (well max 63 machines I think according to the IEEE spec). You don't want to have serial technology nowadays when a 4 port Gigibit switch costs $100.
On a normal network card I can support multiple protocols a higher speed (1Gb) and be connected to a switch.
I can install a 10Gb network card on a mac and have even better performance.
Dobby.
Originally posted by dobby
Install a mac with OS X Server and it will ask whether the firewire port should be used for ip etc.
OS X Server? Isn't IP over Firewire built into Panther?
Just open your Network preference pane, select "Network Port Configurations" from the "Show..." menu, and enable IP over Firewire.
Originally posted by dobby
I can install a 10Gb network card on a mac and have even better performance.
That's great, but try that on an iBook, PowerBook, eMac or iMac.
That's right: it's not possible. You will have 100 MBit or at most 1 GBit Ethernet built-in, but you will also have 400 MBit or maybe even 800 MBit FireWire. For the iBook, which has 100 MBit Ethernet, but 400 MBit FireWire, clearly the latter is the better choice.
Besides, for an ad-hoc solution, FireWire is far superior. You don't have to think of cross-over cabling or how to structure the topology. You just connect. The limitation to 63 devices should be fine for any medium-sized computer room, and in between rooms, you could still bridge through 1 GBit Ethernet.
Btw, on Windows XP Pro, I can easily bridge between FireWire and Ethernet IP networks - any decent way to get that working on Mac OS X?
The only statement you can be sure of is if you have a gigabit ethernet port then you know it is autosensing.