I blatantly ignored all the negative reports of VIA chipsets and
ordered one of the Shuttle SV24 systems. It arrived yesterday.

After putting in a spare CPU and RAM, and a disk that already had a
recent -current on it and getting it booted up, I built a kernel with
fwohci and fw support built in, rebooted, and the firewire ports were
recognized. I connected one of these ports to the IBM cardbus firewire
on my laptop, ifconfiged the fw network interfaces, and proceeded to
communicate between the two machines. Yay! :-)

ttcp between the machines seems to be CPU-bound to about 15MBytes/sec
(for now I just have a 336Mhz Celeron in the Shuttle. The laptop is
500Mhz PIII). Is this because of:

1) That's just as fast as the network stack can go on these machines,
   regardless of the speed/intelligence of the network hardware.

2) some oddity wrt turning firewire into a network interface.

3) A cheap firewire hardware implementation on one end or the other.

??

Next step - buy a firewire enclosure for my CD-RW. (Oh, and do
something to quiet down the damn PS fan! What a whiner!)

BTW, for those insistent on having a Tualatin (or however it's
spelled) PIII, it looks like Shuttle is getting ready to release the
"FV25" motherboard, which is identical to the FV24, but has the
chipset that supports these new CPUs.