Have Microsoft broken IP over FireWire?

17 July 2006

A while back I purchased a FireWire cable to let me hook my Macbook Pro up to my Windows XP box and backup my laptop hard-disk onto a spare drive. Initially setting this up only required manually setting IP addresses on the Mac and Windows box within the same range and then connecting as normal with a network drive over SMB.

For some reason this stopped working one day on the XP machine, telling me that TCP/IP could not be bound to the IEE1394 interface. I followed some tutorials on resetting the TCP/IP stack on Windows but the problem still persists.

Recently I purchased a LaCie external FireWire hard disk and have been using this with the XP machine no problem, so what did Microsoft do to IP over FireWire? I tried completely re-installing the OS, but once all updates had been applied IP over FireWire was once again broken, but the external disk still works.

I have heard that Microsoft have removed support for IP over FireWire in Windows Vista, but why would they backport this feature removal to current versions of XP?!?

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