On Tuesday, Jan 20, 2004, at 19:59 America/Denver, Bruce Best (ACTO) wrote:
Based on the above it appeared to me reasonable to assume that, once Iloaded the correct modules (eth1394), I could configure and use the firewire device, using ethX, in much the same way as a real ethernet device. Which, it turns out, I could.Wow. I'll be damned. Learn something new everyday.
Making the connection work was pretty straightforward; it is essentially thesame as setting up a direct ethernet connection between two standalone machines using a crossover cable, as described athttp://www.reinvented.net/labs/article/1539, but specifying the right ethX device for the firewire port; if you have one ethernet device at eth0, thefirewire device would be eth1.
I first read about someone doing this with a openmosix cluster environment a short time ago (few months). He had machines that all had additional firewire ports and he set up mosix to talk over those instead of over the local LAN, thus keeping the cluster's traffic off of the local network.
It seems like a very useful little trick to have up your sleeve if you need a quick network connection to a newer machine that doesn't have a NIC in it, for some reason. Might also be a slick way to do a little SAN network for backups, etc. in a small server farm.
-- Nate Duehr, nate@natetech.com