[svlug] help transfering data over 1394 cable

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Scott Hess (scott at doubleu.com):

> Whoa.  "8 Port 10 BASE-T Ethernet Hub".

Oh, for heaven's sake.

> Instead of spending any time at all on firewire, you should head to 
> Fry's and drop $20 on a 100 mbit switch.

Better yet, just cobble together a crossover cable, rcp the darned files
over, and have done with it. 

Christian, "Copying File Trees" on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Admin/ gives
general techniques for bulk-copying files, but is not obtimised for
speed.  You could adapt the example recipe for rsync-over-rsh (omitting
the "z" compression option, which would be pointless and
performance-wasting, here).  However, bear in mind that rsync had heavy
overhead (mostly RAM) to perform its famous diff'ing trick, which again
is pretty pointless in the context of a bulk one-time copy.

The general syntax for rcp is like this:

# rcp -rp local_dir remote_hostname:remote_dir

This assumes you have the rshd running, that there are suitable
.rhosts files in the respective home dirs, and that you either have
nameservice or correct entries in /etc/hosts.  (The "r" means recursive,
and the "p" means preserve mtimes and rights masks, ignoring umask.)

But I'm guessing, Christian, that you'll want people to guide you
through all that, too, along with teaching you the relevant use of df
and du, and maybe other things.  So, maybe what you really should be
doing is bringing your machines to some in-person user group event, as
that's more efficient than trying to teach you all of system
administration on the installment plan over a mailing list.