Linking PC and Mac with Firewire?

chrisdamacman · September 12, 2006 9:23AM

Hello everyone,

I have a MacBook specs in sig and my old PC laptop which is a Sony Vaio. The Sony has a 4-pin firewire port and i was wondering whether it is possible to connect the two computers together? Would the two computer see each other and be able to swap files.

I sometimes need to transfer large files and doing this over my 100mb LAN can take a while, since firewire is speedy it would be great if i could connect the two computers. I may have a 6-4 pin Firewire cable lieing around so thats not a problem. I want to do this also because of ease of set up.

thanks

chucker · September 12, 2006 9:27AM

Yeah, both machines can use FireWire as a networking interface.

chrisdamacman · September 12, 2006 9:31AM

Cool! Only just though about it, but have to wait till i get home which will be 9:30pm, yay for leaving doo!

Edit just checked the Vaio Specs and i have FW 400

slughead · September 12, 2006 9:52AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisDaMacMan

Cool! Only just though about it, but have to wait till i get home which will be 9:30pm, yay for leaving doo!

Will it be at 400mb speed? Might have to check the specs on my vaio.

Not even close. Apart from the hardware/software layers slowing stuff down, there's also the hard drive bottleneck. You'd be lucky to get 10MB/s (80mbits)

chrisdamacman · September 12, 2006 9:55AM

Is there a way to measure the speeds of the transfer maybe on the mac side?

slughead · September 12, 2006 9:57AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisDaMacMan

Is there a way to measure the speeds of the transfer maybe on the mac side?

You could transfer files using FTP, and use an FTP client on the PC side.

Or HTTP, if you prefer.

I'd highly recommend using FTP instead of saamba as it's faster and more reliable. I don't trust anything that runs on top of windows explorer.

chucker · September 12, 2006 10:02AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by slughead

You could transfer files using FTP, and use an FTP client on the PC side.

Or HTTP, if you prefer.

I'd highly recommend using FTP instead of saamba as it's faster and more reliable. I don't trust anything that runs on top of windows explorer.

CIFS does not "run on top of Windows Explorer", and calling FTP fast is a good one.

(Kickaha, I'm waiting!)

chrisdamacman · September 12, 2006 4:32PM

Erm ok now your confusing me, how exactly do i transfer files between the two computers?

Also helps if i use free Software I am very poor student after buying this MacBook.

mooch · September 14, 2006 7:57PM

A probably (not useful) word of warning:

Firewire networking capability will not be available in Windows Vista if you're planning on upgrading.

chrisdamacman · September 15, 2006 7:00AM

not really XP will continue to serve my needs, vista is just too bloated, i heard from a friend that the install for the OS alone was 12gb and hes a certified microsoft engineer. and i was amazed how big it was.

splinemodel · September 15, 2006 8:50AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ChrisDaMacMan

Erm ok now your confusing me, how exactly do i transfer files between the two computers?

Also helps if i use free Software I am very poor student after buying this MacBook.

Get them networked, then FTP from one to the other using its IP address. You'll have to set up an FTP server on one, and I'd recommend you do this on the mac because it's easy that way. Just go to the Sharing Sytem Pref and click the FTP box. Then get an FTP client on the PC (Filezilla works, and is free) and punch in the mac's IP, and perhaps your username/pass. Then transfer files.

slughead · September 15, 2006 8:55AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Splinemodel

Get them networked, then FTP from one to the other using its IP address. You'll have to set up an FTP server on one, and I'd recommend you do this on the mac because it's easy that way. Just go to the Sharing Sytem Pref and click the FTP box. Then get an FTP client on the PC (Filezilla works, and is free) and punch in the mac's IP, and perhaps your username/pass. Then transfer files.

The built-in client for FTP on Windows XP works great.

Go into Internet explorer (YES, IT MUST BE IE), and type in ftp://[username]@123.4.5.255

(where [username] is the short name of your user account, and the 123.4.5.255 is the IP of your mac, found in the networking preferences pane)

like magic, Internet Explorer will turn into an intuitive FTP client.

It's even better than Apple's

chrisdamacman · September 15, 2006 11:44AM

wow thanks guy thats awesome tips

pak150 · September 22, 2006 1:22PM

I'm having a similar problem. I just bought a Macbook for the office, and would like it to share my PC's internet connection via firewire. I've managed to get the computers to share files by manually configuring the IP addresses within the firewire settings on XP and the mac I can network share between them without any problem, but I can't seem to share internet. I've enabled internet sharing on the XP machine to share through the LAN, but no luck.

Has anyone tried to do something similar to this? The reason I have to share through the PC as opposed to my mac relates to my company's ... desire not to have macs on their network (bah!)

pak150 · September 23, 2006 4:23PM

So I figured it out. If anyone else is ever nuts enough to have to do the same thing (it's the same process if you're connecting via ethernet too), here's the steps. First, enable connection sharing on XP on whichever connection is attached to the internet. This will give whichever device you want to share (such as firewire) a static IP 192.168.0.1. Now, on your Mac, disable your firewall if you have it running, go to your network settings in system preferences, and select whichever connection you're using to connect to the windows/internet machine. Under TCP/IP configure your address manually, and give yourself an ip address of 192.168.0.2 (anything but 1). Set the router to 192.168.0.1, and your DNS server to whatever your window's machine's DNS server is.

Voila - it works. It's sad how long this took me, when it took me all of 5 minutes to do it in the other direction!

guglido · February 10, 2007 10:10PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pak150

So I figured it out. If anyone else is ever nuts enough to have to do the same thing (it's the same process if you're connecting via ethernet too), here's the steps. First, enable connection sharing on XP on whichever connection is attached to the internet. This will give whichever device you want to share (such as firewire) a static IP 192.168.0.1. Now, on your Mac, disable your firewall if you have it running, go to your network settings in system preferences, and select whichever connection you're using to connect to the windows/internet machine. Under TCP/IP configure your address manually, and give yourself an ip address of 192.168.0.2 (anything but 1). Set the router to 192.168.0.1, and your DNS server to whatever your window's machine's DNS server is.

Voila - it works. It's sad how long this took me, when it took me all of 5 minutes to do it in the other direction!

Need Help with this. thanks in advance.

ok so as of now i can share via ftp with filezilla. when i go from pc and go to 10.0.0.1/Nick and it works

this is via a 6-4 firewire cable.

ON PC under 1394 Connection (firewire)

IP address: 10.0.0.2

Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0

Default Gateway _blank_

Preferred DNS server: 10.10.0.1 (i just came up with this randomly)

ON MAC under the firewire connection i created

IP address: 10.0.0.1

Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0

Router 10.0.0.2

DNS server: 10.10.0.1 (same random # from above)

under my ethernet DNS it gave me "obtain DNS server address automatically"

other information. its running on a mac mini *running 10.4.8* and an older sony vaio laptop with xp home.

i think it might have something to do with DNS server # im using...just a guess.

hopefully someone can lead me in the right direction

EDIT*should have said, trying to get it so i can connect to internet on PC when mac mini is connected to internet via ethernet*

Linking PC and Mac with Firewire?

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