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Security Businesses Apple

IP over Firewire Updated 101

Posted by pudge from the scary-sweet dept.
foniksonik writes "Apple released an update to its IP over FireWire software. 'Now the IP over FireWire Preview Release adds support for using the Internet Protocol - commonly known as TCP/IP - over FireWire. ... Using the existing Network Preferences Pane, users can add FireWire as their IP network node to connect and communicate between two machines. ... In all cases, Rendezvous can be used if desired for configuration, name resolution, and discovery.'" Now it is time for YA debate on FireWire vs. Ethernet. Let the festivities commence!
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IP over Firewire Updated More

IP over Firewire Updated

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  • some info. (Score:5, Informative)

    by sirfunk ( 667309 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @11:07PM (#5942221)
    this page [pcbuyersguide.com], has plenty of info on tcp/ip over firewire.. w/ a quick read looks like length is the biggest problem, 2nd to no implimentation supporting more then 2 devices.
  • I guess this is kinda IP over serial SCSI?

    -psy
  • Now all we need is some nice IEEE1394.b optical-connection switches! Oh yeah.

  • Gigabit ethernet versus firewire (Score:5, Insightful)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @11:19PM (#5942281)
    So how is this better than gigabit ethernet which is standard on most macs?
    Is it just another way of communicating that perhaps allows one to avoid a congested/insecure ethernet backbone when connecting two neigboring macs?
    what's the big deal?
    • I'm not quite sure, but maybe if you already have a decent firewire network setup, you can add one as a gateway relatively easily, and therefore not rewire everything for ethernet. Admittedly, this seems rather stupid. However, if everything is setup properly, I believe with firewire you can buy a hub, and share (For example) a digital camera with any mac also connected to the hub. If you have a setup like this, then adding networking to it would be as simple as a configuration change on your gateway, be
    • This would be useful for connnecting a Mac to a PC laptop or desktop.

      • Re:Gigabit ethernet versus firewire (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Well for one thing it'll be more convenient than using Firewire Target Disk mode to move a big file or disk image (IP over FW won't require that one of the participants be rebooted) and for another you could probably construct a small network by daisy-chaining without incurring the expense of GB hub/switches.

    • Re:Gigabit ethernet versus firewire (Score:5, Informative)

      by Duck_Taffy ( 551144 ) <cheneyho@@@yahoo...com> on Monday May 12, 2003 @11:59PM (#5942466)
      Gigabit isn't standard on most macs. It's standard on most pro model macs - the towers, and the 15" and 17" PowerBooks. Not available on the iMacs, eMacs, iBooks, or 12" PowerBook. Those are only available in the 10/100 variety of ethernet. Besides which, the first models of 15" PowerBook G4 came in 10/100 only, as well as the first two generations of G4 towers. So yeah, lots of computers currently in use that don't have Gigabit.

      The other advantage is that FireWire hubs are much cheaper than Gigabit Ethernet switches.

    • Re:Gigabit ethernet versus firewire (Score:5, Informative)

      by Gropo ( 445879 ) <groopoNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @12:06AM (#5942500) Homepage Journal
      OS X features Multilink Multihoming, which allows multiple concurrent interfaces to IP ports. Conceivably, if you wished to cluster two Macs you could use 1394b, 802.11g and 1000BaseT (and even the 56k modems, I guess) simultaneously to pass packets to the client machine, thereby alleviating your bandwidth bottleneck by a huge margin.

      I wouldn't say "better," I'd say "extends the functionailty of the machine"
    • A friend and I thought it would be cool to have an airport station with a single wire, (firewire 800) that would send both data and power to help reduce cable clutter. We concluded it would have to be firewire 800 due to the cable length constraints of firewire 400 even though it's a bit of overkill the geek factor would be high.
    • So how is this better than gigabit ethernet which is standard on most macs?

      I think it is a suppliment for ethernet.

      For instance, by roommate has a laptop and a desktop but only one ethernet port, so he uses IP over Firewire to have both computers on the internet.

      It is also useful if you need to connect two computers but you are already using the ethernet jack on one of them.

    • Re:Gigabit ethernet versus firewire (Score:4, Insightful)

      by SensitiveMale ( 155605 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @01:06AM (#5942698)
      Have you prices gigabit ethernet switches lately?

      Have you priced firewire hubs?

      Big difference.

    • Re:Gigabit ethernet versus firewire (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dbirchall ( 191839 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @01:51AM (#5942807) Journal
      FireWire 400 is obviously slower than Gigabit Ethernet. As is FireWire 800. But the second-generation FireWire spec [1394ta.org] defines speeds up to 3200Mbps (3.2Gbps) over appropriate cables (fiber, I believe) and distances (short).

      It remains to be seen whether FireWire will hit 3.2GBps before 10GBps Ethernet becomes affordable. (Even if it does, I'd really expect people to use it more for SANs and NAS than for ordinary networks.)

      • Not true. In practice (yes, we have a Gig E network) you RARELY get over 300Mbps from a Gig E link - FW 400 can hit these rates just fine.
      • over appropriate cables (fiber, I believe) and distances (short).

        Short over copper, but you can go 100 meters at 3200mbps with a full 1394b implementation. See here [apple.com].

        Since you can run Firewire 800 over optical now, and it uses the same MM fiber, wire up with fiber now and upgrade to 3200 when it's available. The cables and connectors are supposed to be future-proof this time.

        Of course, providing power over optical cable is likely to be a challenge.
    • ehhh, that's a tough one ... but *maybe* because it's WAY cheaper and simpler for the guy that wants to do a transfer on another machine only occasionally ?
    • It's not necessarily better, or worse, than any other networking, it's just there because it's useful. Macs going back a few years now all have firewire. The hardware exists on the machines already, and writing a driver to give a little extra free functionality never hurt.

      You probably COULD create a fresh new firewire only protocol to communicate to other machines, but when TCP/IP is awfully well tested already and integrates with every other app - hey, it's free extra functionality.

      now IP over USB? why n
    • "So how is this better than gigabit ethernet which is standard on most macs?"

      It isn't, really. I tried it out when they first released IP over Firewire and found it about equalled my normal Gigabit E performance - the problem being that 1394 cabling costs the Earth. Mind you, my setup was using FW 400 - you may well be able to exceed Gig E's practicle bandwidth limitations when using Macs with FW 800 on the motherboard. Still, it's a great technology for Apple to implement - if nothing more it effectively

  • old hat (Score:4, Informative)

    by g4dget ( 579145 ) on Monday May 12, 2003 @11:50PM (#5942427)
    The eth1394 driver has been in the Linux kernel for a while. You can find a discussion of using IEEE 1394 for compute clusters here [mit.edu]. And, you can do the same with both USB 1 and USB 2.

    Generally, Gigabit Ethernet is more flexible, easier to maintain, and has more third party hardware available for it, but if you have a motherboard with FW and are setting up a special-purpose, low-cost cluster, IEEE1394 or USB2 networking may be a reasonable choice.

    • Yeah, IP over Firewire for OS X has been around for some time [macslash.org], too. It's just been updated.

    • I actually thought about the IEEE1394 cluster idea for a while, after I bought a $20, 3-port card for my desktop machine. Shortly after getting it home and installed, I had a thought of building a star-topology cluster, with each node using its three ports to connect to three others, shortening the distance between them vs. a daisy-chained setup.

      Unfortunately, the CPU utilization figures I've seen for the Linux kernel support for IP-over-IEEE1394 suggests that you couldn't really get too close to maximum b
      • Also, that is 3 ports on the same 1394 bus, so it would be 400/3 Mb/s on each cable. I had the same thought (I also investigated IP/SCSI), but ethernet is the best value in this price range.

        Joe
    • I've never been able to get the eth1394 driver to work under Red Hat 9. Anyone have any pointers for getting it going between an OS X system and Red Hat 9?
  • Check this out [slashdot.org], but this isn't Mac specific. I'd love to have a PowerMac here to put it in the daisy chain and get some more fun out of ieee1394.

    Several weeks after the JE was written, I am generally pleased with the technology because it solved one of my problem (need for a p2p network connection between computers on different LANs). The biggest disappointment I have is for performance which is not great (only marginally faster that FastEthernet and certainly not line rate), and high CPU utilization (bot

  • Useful when Ethernet is "in use" (Score:5, Informative)

    by macmastery ( 600662 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @12:10AM (#5942513) Homepage Journal
    IP over FireWire is most useful when the Ethernet port is in use (such as, on a server). Let's say you have a full-time web server, serving over its ethernet interface. Say you need to upload more content, but you can't take that ethernet port or that server offline. You can upload the content and let the ethernet continue to serve as much as it can. It's handy and you don't need a complex networking solution.

    Also, consumer machines can have faster file transfers without shutting one machine down into target disk mode. I think it's supposed to be simple and fast, not scalable and fastEST.
    • A complex networking solution ?
      Like say, a hub ?
      Or even a switch.

      Your hypothetical server's ethernet interface is probably connected to a broadband connection with significantly lower bandwidth than ethernet so uploading new content isn't likely to max out your connection.

      And if your web server is serving huge volumes of traffic then I guess you're probably running some kind of big fancy operation that would have the sense and the budget to run multiple servers each with multiple nics and the full load ba
    • I could have used this last week when I was trying to transfer 15 G of music from my Powermac to my Powerbook. Over an Airport link.

      I finally broke down and plugged in a hub and did it over Ethernet - but if I had used my Firewire cable, it would have finished in 30 seconds.
      • Um, you could have put the powerbook in target disk mode (hold down t at bootup till you see a firewire icon). Then the powerbook acts as a simple firewire hard drive. BTW, it would still take a hell of a lot longer than 30 seconds. Asuming you could utilize a whoping %50 of the theoretical max of the link speed on the raw data layer (200Mbps/25MBps) it would still take at least 10 minutes.
    • From my experience with a previous release of Apple IP over Firewire, it seems slow, and it has very high overhead. A dual 800MHz G4 host which can transmit at well over 1.4 Gb/sec (using ethernet-over-Myrinet) maxes its CPU out at
      200Mb/sec, or less with IP over Firewire. GigE performance maxes out at something over 700Mb/sec. Both tests were run against a 15" 867MHz Powerbook directly connected (no switches in either case)

      As other posters pointed out, GigE switch hardware is much more expensive. But if
  • MacInTouch held this discussion a while back... [macintouch.com] Might be some useful info in there somewhere. Of course, this was just prior to 800mb FW.
  • Ethernet is dirt-cheap and everywhere, gigabit is backwards compatible. Game over.

  • Let's hope this is standard in Panther (Score:4, Informative)

    by MalleusEBHC ( 597600 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @03:07AM (#5942989)
    I'm hoping that they slide IP over FireWire in as a standard feature on Panther. I've been using it since January, and I must say that it is excellent. The speed isn't quite there yet, but it is good enough. By this, I mean that target disk mode still gives noticeably faster transfers, but this feels faster than 100mbps ethernet. (I haven't run numbers, sue me.)

    For the people out there questioning "Why?", here goes. For machines with built in ethernet and no PCI slots, this is a godsend. I have my Cube and my TiBook on a little LAN using IP over FireWire and Internet Sharing. Since the Cube's ethernet port is dedicated to the network connection, the only other way I would have been able to do this would be AirPort, and this obviously blows that away for bandwidth. With AirPort, large file transfers would take forever, and I probably couldn't max out my connection. (Gotta love college hookups!)

    This is just one of the many reasons why I love Apple so much. For all the things in OS X that get big press, there are so many little treasures such as IP over FireWire. Even for a preview release, it's pretty damn well polished. (Disclaimer: Many have complained that is has trashed prefs on install, but in two installs and two upgrades I've never had this problem.) Keep up the good work Apple, and make this a part of the standard install ASAP.
    • FYI: It's already standard in Mac OS X Server, at least from version 10.2.5 on - it may have been introduced earlier, but I didn't notice at the time.
    • Perhaps an ethernet router/hub would be more appropriate for your application than IP over Firewire. While firewire may be faster, ethernet is universally supported on every OS on every platform, and requires no additional configuration or software when using DHCP.

      and by the way - windows xp had this built in when it was released (I believe 2000 Pro did as well), and Linux has had this for some time too (although in the traditional linux fashion, it's difficult to set up, doesn't support all hardware, whi
  • At the time when IEEE1394 was issued, the max cable length was 4.5m . Now there are many 10m cables. What is the actual maximum cable length for say 400Mbps? How does it compare with Gigabit Ethernet?
    • 1Gbps ethernet is specified for 100m on CAT5e-cable. You cannot necessarily expect available cables to follow the specification; there are plenty of out-of-spec USB and PATA-cables.
    • I'm not sure what it is for 400 but fir 1394b (FW800), you can use optical cables at up to 100m. There are plug-in optical transcievers that run inline between the 1394b port and the optical cable.

  • Share firewire devices (Score:2, Interesting)

    by johram ( 660233 )
    I've been toying around with the new IP over Firewire and noticed something quite interesting. I've got my iBook connected to the second fw400 port on my DP1.25ghz fw800 MDD powermac. The first fw400 port on my powermac is used by my 30gig iPod. I installed the new release on both machines and when I had rebooted my iPod showed up on both my iBook and my Powermac. I don't know if this was Rendezvous, which I know is now implemented on the new release. I can see how this could be quite useful in a setti
  • Something that cluster guys may want to think about is the use of Firewire 800 as a cluster media (like a control net) for a group of n xserves (or any other mac). This would be an alternative (since the FW800 is already there) buying a load of Cisco 4000 or 6500 switches to run the control net. I'm actually not sure how many nodes it can handle, but I assume it would be enough to run a small to medium mac cluster. Along those same lines, when testing the performance of FW400 between nodes using iperf (
  • This is a very good thing to come from Apple.
    They are getting into higher-performance computing clusters, with the release of things like the Xserve Cluster Node [apple.com] that has two FireWire ports. FireWire provides HEAPS lower latency than ethernet, so to link a few cluster nodes together, and avoid paying big money for exotic low-latency interconnects, it's now all included.
    - k

  • redundancy (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bobba22 ( 566693 )
    Ok, so it's not as fast as gigE but it makes one hell of a redundant system to daisychain round a few nodes. As a previous poster said, it will also take some bottleneck strain. There's the possibility of using it for LAN parties without half the hardware cost (if indeed it can be daisychained - and I can't see why not)The quicker this gets fully implemented, the better.
    • There's the possibility of using it for LAN parties without half the hardware cost
      What are you gonna do when the guy in the middle has to go home? This is kinda like steping back into the past of 10base2 (BNC).

      Small ethernet hubs/switches are cheap.

  • Target disk mode... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by weave ( 48069 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @07:36AM (#5943758) Journal
    What I use a lot is target disk mode. Very nice for transferring my huge tunes archive to my laptop. Just plug a firewire cable into your source mac, then into your powered down destination (target) mac, then power up the target mac while holding down the T key. A funky firewire symbol screensaver comes up and your second mac's disk icon appears on your source mac's desktop. Very nice.

    The only weird thing I can't figure out yet is how it mounts that other disk. All files are owned by the admin owner and you can't chown anything on the target macs disk, therefore if I backup /Users to it with "rsync -a", it requires later booting up the destination mac and "chown -R" each user's home dir. There must be a mount option somewhere to deal with this...

    • The beauty of this is that you won't have to reboot either computer to do all that file swapping. Just share, appl-K, and you're ready.
  • really nice for computers like my 12in PowerBook which only have 100T ethernet.

    In testing, I've found FTPing over a FireWire cable has very lovely results.
  • I have an ibook with a broken Ethernet port.

    My options seem to be.
    1) find a usb/ethernet adapter that works with OSX. (difficult because all macs seem to have built in ethernet.)
    2) airport card, but I'm not sure how that would work with my current network (linux box as firewall/ipmasq )

    but now this seems like a viable option. If I attached via firewire to the G4 would I be able to see the whole network or just files on the G4?
    • If your G4 has a internet connection you should enable internet connection sharing and then you will be able to use NAT (Network Address Translation) to access the net. Essentially your G4 becomes the network gateway/router and it will pass through your requests.

  • IPoFW (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dr00g911 ( 531736 ) on Tuesday May 13, 2003 @10:43AM (#5945269)
    IP Over Firewire has been really useful for me in a couple of situations -- most notably when I've needed to run backups of my main Macs. For day-to-day use, I stick to 10/100 though -- it's cheaper to implement, and I can crimp my own cables on a whim.

    I've got a Shuttle barebones based Wintel system with built-in firewire and a pair of massive drives that I use for a rendering station/backup server -- and let me tell you -- backing up 130 gigs worth of DV footage/uncompressed TIFFs (insert pr0n joke here) over Firewire is one hell of a lot quicker than waiting for the same over 100mbps Ethernet. XP is slightly flaky when it comes to IP over firewire (no, i *don't* want those connections bridged!) but once you get it running it's a little more stable than your average house of cards.

    I know a lot of photographers who swear by Target Disk mode as well -- they carry their powerbooks as preview stations and Big Honkin Memory Cards (using Firewire-connected pro cameras) and once they get back to their main machine to retouch, they just go into target mode and stuff dumps *fast*. Now if only I could get a kodak camera back to interface with my iPod......

    All things being equal, I've been tempted to convert everything I've got over to firewire from the stock ethernet jacks -- but I honestly have better uses for a firewire port most of the time (DVD-R, DVcam, DVDeck, DV-to-component box, iPod), and I really prefer to rely on my router for connection sharing instead of the Mac.

    • I want to make a similar connection between my OS X system and my WinXP system. I want each system to get their Internet independently from my router over the Ethernet, but also be able to talk to each other via IPoFW.

      The purpose is to run Remote Desktop Connection or VNC to control the PC from the Mac environment at super high speed.

      I've had the same problems with XP bridging the connections. Anybody have tips for how to get this done?

      Others have suggested removing the Ethernet connection from the PC,
      • Try setting the TCP Firewire connection on the PC to be on a different subnet than the ethernet (ie 192.168.1.xxx vs 192.168.100.xxx). That way you don't need to deal with connection bridging, etc -- the Mac's Internet sharing should handle the port forwarding properly if you enable it for the Firewire connection (should be en1 or en2).

        You can also go in and hack around in the IPFW config (if youre so inclined), or use something like BrickHouse to edit the built-in firewall and port forwarding.

        Basically w
  • While I'm sure that many of the reasons outlined here about why you could use this are true. I think Apple is doing this for Rendezvous support. The Zeroconf guy [zeroconf.org] has basically said so. I know there was an article where they said they (Apple) wanted to use IP for just about every connection instead of inventing new protocols. Rendezvous is not just for iChat, but is for other devices and technologies down the road. This fits in to the big picture.

    Of course if THAT'S true then we can start speculating about

  • the IP over FireWire Preview Release adds support for using the Internet Protocol - commonly known as TCP/IP

    No, IP is just known as IP. TCP sits on top of it, but it's not the only one who can. UDP does too, and anything else could if you felt like it.

    I know this is getting picky, but this is "news for nerds", so try to keep it straight.
  • wow... the Apple Developer Connection web site seems to either developing extra-sensory perception, or doing some information gathering behind our collective backs. the bit that gave them away was this, on the first page i saw after logging in:
    You currently have no assets.
    well, damn! it's not bad enough that they're checking up on my financial status, but do they have to rub it in?
  • When this first came out a few months ago, I did a few tests, copying an 850 MB .img between two OS X G4s in various ways: (times are min:sec) (original thread over here [macslash.org])
    TCP/IP over 10/100 LAN: 1:30
    IP over FireWire: 1:50
    FireWire with 1 Mac in target disk mode: 1:25
    TCP/IP over 1000bT (straignt cable): 0:27
    My conclusion at the time was "Slow, but potentially useful." Well, I have since found a use. I have a G4 here at work and recently bought an iBook. I put the (old) IP-FW driver on both Macs, gave them

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