FireWire Network

[Mauldor]

On my Many PC's I have normal Network installed, on one of them Firewire is built in and the other has a 3 port Firewire card installed and working. Now I wired up a cable (firewire 6 pin to 6 pin) between the two computers. One runs windows XP Pro SP 2 and the other run's Win2003 Server. I assigned a Ip to each (tried both 192.168.0.1/255.255.255.0 & 10.0.0.1/255.0.0.0) leaving the other box's blank.

The task bar tells me it is connected but I cannot ping eaither machine or connect to it. The next thing I tried was the network wizard on XP, after this was complete I could both Ping and \\10.0.0.2 (file://\\10.0.0.2) to the machine and see the shares. Two things though that was strange:

1. IE Tells me it is not online, retry and it works (prob due to not knowing what network to use).
2. Speed was slow, in fact tested and it was 2mbit per second, the same then as my NTL Connction by chance.

I did used to have this working months ago no problems and trasferring at full speed but have no idea what has changed. My only thought was Win2003 has something to so with it. ANybody tried this and maybe there is something I need to run??

[Raistlin]

Any chance that this is a firewall issue?

[Mauldor]

Any chance that this is a firewall issue?

Well this crossed my Mind, the only firewall on there is the SP2 one. I have another machine running Windows XP and that has a fire-wire, what I will do is a few tests such as Xp to XP, to try and rule out the problem. I did find it very odd that using the network Wizard on XP made it work but limited the speed to same speed as Cable modem (used a Bandwidth meter on each interface). The RJ45 network came in at about 70-80 which is correct (100mbit network) but as i say - max speed Fire-wire network came in at 2mbit - very odd indeed.

I have searched for a few days now on Google for guides, answers etc, tried pretty much everything I can think of ATM.

[update to my testing]

This is what I have tried so far then:
Xp to XP (both SP2)
XP to win2003
Other XP to 2003
Tried 3 different cables, in case it was the cable, switced off any Firewall in place, ran the Wizard on each machine. Also tried a few different ports on each computer (3 on each one) and removing the device, re-installing. I have a feeling it has something to do with XP SP2 tbh - As i mentioned it used to work a long time ago and all I did back then was set one port at 192.168.0.1 and the other at .2 and could then bring up the share by typing \\192.168.0.2\d$ (file://\\192.168.0.2\d$) and trasfered 400mbit (or close to) no problems.