1394 networking XP to XP

Please can you guys help me. I'm trying to network an XP Home PC to an XP Pro machine over FireWire. The Pro machine has a creative audigy sound card with firewire port and the other has a Zonet ZFN2600 PCI firewire card.

I set their IP addresses to:
192.168.1.1 for the Pro machine and
192.168.1.2 for the Home one
and the subnet masks to: 255.255.255.0

Even before I hook the cable up it says that the connection is up but when I open the status window it hasen't sent or received anything. Also on the Support tab of the Status window all the addresses are "<Unavailable>" this is the same on both machines.

I then hook up the cable (this seems to have no effect) and try to ping the other machine and it times out. If I use ipconfig.exe the 1394 connection doesn't even show up here. I have no firewall on the connection.

What else could be the cause? I'm running Norton Internet Security. Could that be it? It still won't work with this turned off though.

Please tell me anything you can in this as I'm new to networking but I'm eager to learn. I had the connection working yesterday, just won't work since I restarted!

I used to have an 1394 connection between two computers, but in the end it was so unreliable that I scrapped it and converted to ethernet.

I used to have the same problems, where the cable seemed to have no effect on the network status, and nothing you seemed to do resolved the problem. I seem to remember unplugging and reconnecting the cable into each computer, which usually got the connection working OK.

I think the problem is due to the fact that 1394 connections are not really designed to be used as networking between two computers, and is more designed to connect hardware to a computer.

You could try FireNet (http://www.unibrain.com/1394_produc.../firenet_pc.htm) which makes the firewire connection appear as an ethernet connection. I seem to remember having success with this myself.

Otherwise, I'm sorry I can't really give any more help apart from unplugging the connection from each computer and plugging it in again until you get that bing sound, telling you that hardware has been connected.

Thanks, I got it working in the end. The trick is to let windows control the clients automatically (use the network setup wizard) but configure the server manually. It's working with ICS and it's stable now. 11 megs a second transfers ... nice.

That's a good speed