[weblacky]

You absolutely can but with ethernet ports this old you will not get auto-crossover. So you will have to custom crimp a crossover ethernet cable or use a commercial crossover adapter.

This was a very standard thing to do in the 90s but it's literally unheard of these days. There are adapters on Amazon for crossover so that you can take a normal ethernet cable and attach a small adapter to have it become a crossover cable, and that might be more what you would want to do.

product link: https://a.co/d/japisPD

Gigabit by standard can auto-crossover even if it's only one port of the pair so you never see crossover cables for sale anymore. Below one gigabit some ports had auto crossover but it wasn't very common. For 10Mb it was never heard of for automatic crossover.

However you will not have automated network config services unless one of the two hosts has them. So you'll likely be establishing a static IP address on both clients and establishing no static gateway unless you're going to share/IP forward from one of the hosts. You should only need to establish aesthetic IP address and net mask to show them they're in the same subnet. You would not establish a default gateway as there would be none.

There was a later protocol called zero config that was picked up in the Windows XP days that uses local link addresses to auto-configure themselves. Though those have their own issues of not just working out of the box and it still won't help with Irix.

I've not personally dealt with IPv6 on Irix but if it supports the standard installation you could also do a zero config on IPv6 by allowing by SLAAC, but you have to install additional components to enable IPv6 so there might be a chicken and the egg problem there anyway. It would likely be easier just to establish static IPv4 address on each directly-connected station.

Please note you won't make anything explode if you try to use a normal cable, it just won't work. You either need a crimp a crossover cable yourself or buy one of these adapters to make a standard ethernet cable crossover if you want to attach two stations with a single ethernet cable with no hub or switch or any other device in between the two.

Ah, I’ll update this thread once I upgrade to 6.5.22…

With that being said, I do have another reason for wanting networking: transferring files from Mac to Indy. I do have FileZilla set up, and wanted to know if I could do ethernet to ethernet? Directly transferring files without a router as a middle man. Is that networking process different than what’s been discussed above?

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As long as you also set your net mask correctly that is all you should need. You only need your default gateway if you're going to an address that's not part of your local subnet.

Just putting in the IP address alone with no other information will not allow everything to work properly. You need to specify the netmask correctly, but you do not need a default gateway if you do not expect to use the Internet or any other subnet that isn't within 192.168.1.0/24

Hmm ok that’s good to know. So if I were to set my Ethernet IP to 192.168.1.1 and the Indy to 192.168.1.2 that should work?