Three things I'd like to add:
1) An trouble-free way to set up networking is to enable internet sharing from your active NIC to your FireWire port. No need to configure manual IP addresses!
2) If both computers have it, gigabit ethernet is faster than FireWire 400, and potentially less problematic (again, this hint is still advantageous on older Macs). Theoretically it's faster than FW800 as well, but many Macs have a gigabit chipset implementation that maxes out at around 650mb/s so this depends on your model.
3) Odds are, in most cases, if you already have a firewire drive, it's even easier to unmount it from one computer and mount it on the second computer (and this will provide superior throughput too). Sure, there's less geek credibility, and *I* can see why you might want the drive to be accessible to more than one computer at a time... more often than not I may do a direct computer to computer firewire networking connection, especially if one of those computers doesn't have GigE.

Also, I believe there's the potential that plugging two Macs into a single drive via FireWire has the potential to short out the drive's bridgeboard and/or one or more logic boards.
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I just invested in a gigabit airport base station and a netgear 5 port gigabit switch. Now my lan is all on a gigabit pipes. No need for firewire networking. And clients on my wifi are using wireless N so get 3x100baseT



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I can't believe you would consider hooking one disk drive to two machines at once. Currently the OS has no facility for dealing with two machines accessing the same file system simultaneously. This can only lead to hideous disk structure corruption.

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He's not. Not in the sense you're assuming.

When the disk is mounted on one computer, it cannot be mounted on the second; at least until the first unmounts it.

(Hint: this is why the original hint works.)

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