eth1394 networking

[Bullitt]

Has anyone tried this? My only experience was accidental when trying to make a amd64 port work on my rig. The debian installer at the time, would pick up on the firewire interface and attempt to run tcp/ip over ieee1394.

Long story short, I want to play around with it b/c my fileserver is physically close and I dont have a gig-e interface in that box.

I've been googling most of the night for a howto or something to get the bloody thing working, but I'm banging my head against the wall.

lspci shows the device there (a Texas Instruments device, supposedly well supported by the eth1394 module).

0000:00:0d.0 FireWire (IEEE 1394): Texas Instruments TSB43AB23 IEEE-1394a-2000 Controller (PHY/Link) (prog-if 10 [OHCI])

modprobe 1394 goes well, but doesnt assign an "ethx" interface for me to play with.

lsmod | grep 1394
eth1394                19208  0 
raw1394                27884  0 
ieee1394               92856  2 eth1394,raw1394

rmmod eth194 and a manual "insmod eth1394 eth1" yields "eth1394: disagrees about version of symbol struct_module"

gscanbus result "couldn't set port: Invalid argument"

The last thing I read was that eth1394 support has to be built into the kernel instead of a loaded module. I'm re-compiling a kernel and forced eth1394 to be built-in (not a module) but am I on the right track?

Edit: I was using a stock debian 2.6.11 kernel, then 2.6.14 before I started a recompile.

 

[Bullitt]

For those who are interested:

My issue turned out to be cabling related. Meaning, I didnt have the two ports physically connected. Once I hooked up the cables, an "ifconfig eth1 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx yyy.yyy.yyy.yyy up" worked. I was trying to hook it directly to a windows machine and I also had to disable/enable my windows interface before things finally "took off."

Needless to say, I'm impressed with the results so far and I get a rock solid 100Mb/s using a 400mhz firewire connection. I'll have to up the processor power of my fileserver (again) because a single xfer now sucks up 92% of the CPU. Incidentally, its a 1.0ghz Thunderbird. Not exactly high-performance now, but its the most I can spare.

Ethernet on the same box (realtek onboard NIC) gave me 78Mb/s, but only 30% or so CPU. I'm not sure whats better.

Steps I used:
Kernel 2.6.14 recompiled to include eth1394 (per linux1394.org's suggestion)
plug'n'play.

edit: Any ideas as to why my CPU is through the roof? Just a sucky firewire interface on the mobo?