Dumb question about 1394 connection?

[Brayne Ded]

Can internet sharing be done via two PCs over their 1394 connections, and in
so is there any advantage doing this over using standard LAN cards?

 

[kony]

Can internet sharing be done via two PCs over their 1394 connections, and in
so is there any advantage doing this over using standard LAN cards?

I'd imagine there are some adapters out there somewhere as
it's technically possible, but not only is there no
advantage, it would be a definite downgrade relative to a
standard LAN card, 100Mbit. If you need more lan
performance consider Gigabit Ethernet, but that is only for
the LAN, the internet wouldn't be any faster due to IT being
the bottleneck from the ISP.

 

[Synapse Syndrome]

Can internet sharing be done via two PCs over their 1394 connections, and
in so is there any advantage doing this over using standard LAN cards?

Yes. An IEEE 1394 connection between the two computers will be a lot faster
than normal Fast Ethernet, but not as fast as Gigabit Ethernet. But the two
computers will have to be less than 5m away from eachother. If you are
using XP Pro you can can make a software bridge between the firewire network
and your internet connection so that all computers can connect to the
internet.

ss.

 

[kony]

Yes. An IEEE 1394 connection between the two computers will be a lot faster
than normal Fast Ethernet, but not as fast as Gigabit Ethernet.

Not for internet sharing it won't be faster. The reason is
that while firewire has a theoretical and even realized lan
throughput advantage, that advantage could only be exploited
IFthe data exchange from the ISP was higher than the limit
on the ethernet lan. Since it isn't higher, the remaining
difference is the higher overhead of firewire and of it's
utilization for networking. It's essentially a software
driven port a bit like a winmodem vs a hardware modem,
thinkgs like checksums aren't offloaded.

 

[Synapse Syndrome]

Not for internet sharing it won't be faster. The reason is
that while firewire has a theoretical and even realized lan
throughput advantage, that advantage could only be exploited
IFthe data exchange from the ISP was higher than the limit
on the ethernet lan. Since it isn't higher, the remaining
difference is the higher overhead of firewire and of it's
utilization for networking. It's essentially a software
driven port a bit like a winmodem vs a hardware modem,
thinkgs like checksums aren't offloaded.

From my limited experience, using the (often redundant) firewire ports to
network two computers is a hell of a lot faster than FastEthernet. That's
all I said, but you wouldn't have mad ethat statement if the question was
about Gigabit Ethernet, so why are you talking about WAN?

ss.

 

[kony]

From my limited experience, using the (often redundant) firewire ports to
network two computers is a hell of a lot faster than FastEthernet. That's
all I said, but you wouldn't have mad ethat statement if the question was
about Gigabit Ethernet, so why are you talking about WAN?

I'm talking about WAN because that's relevant- the question
was about internet sharing, which is still the bottleneck
regardless of whether the other system is on the LAN or not.
So essentially what you end up with is a data rate not
bottlenecked by 100Mb ethernet, vs firewire which uses more
CPU time for every transfer.