Hi folks,

I have read over quite a few articles and post about hostnames. I have two boxes, both running Fedora Core 4, and one Windows box, all of which are connected through my netgear router. I want to be able to ssh to my apache box to have access to files using my computers name rather than the IP address. My router is set up for DHCP but it doesn't seem to change IP address and I have tried setting up the hostname using hostname mybox.mynetwork on both computers and have also edited both /etc/hosts to read:

192.168.0.3 mybox.mynetwork mybox

in the first linux box (non apache)

192.168.0.4 mybox2.mynetwork mybox2

in the second linux box (apache).

I am getting confused with DHCP servers and FQDN, do I need to have a real domain name to get this to work? Sorry if the answer is staring me in the face but I am really stressing over this now, I kknow it should be simple, but it aint!

Any help is appreciated

If you have following in the hosts file:

192.168.0.3 mybox.mynetwork mybox
192.168.0.4 mybox2.mynetwork mybox2

then 'ssh mybox' will connect you to 192.168.0.3, 'ssh mybox2' to 192.168.0.4

and so on.

I would use the same hosts file on all machines even if the machine is listed.
192.168.0.3 mybox.mynetwork.com mybox
192.168.0.4 mybox2.mynetwork.com mybox2

/etc/host.conf should look like this to check hostnames first.
order hosts,bind

Also you should setup the ethernet as static and not as dhcp so they will always have the same IP on boot.
Example of /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0
DEVICE=eth0
BOOTPROTO=none
BROADCAST='tion: --broadcast'
# HWADDR=00:90:32:0D:2F:58
IPADDR=192.168.231.58
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
NETWORK='option: --network'
ONBOOT=no
TYPE=Ethernet
GATEWAY=192.168.231.1

Brian1

Hey guys,

Thanks for all the help. I can't check out what you said until I finish work but I think the problem was I was only putting the IP address of the host computer in the etc/hosts file, I never thought about putting both IP addresses on, I must have thought that it would mess up with that individual computers IP or something. I'll post back later on to let you know how it goes. And thanks Brian1, I will be sure to disable DHCP.

Cheers again

Hi guys,

This is honestly the first chance I've had to post back (2 jobs...getting to old for this :P). Ok, I changed the hosts file on both computers to allow access using the hostnames.

Files looked like this
This has allowed me to connect to my machine as I wanted, so thanks very much guys! Again, sorry I couldn't post back sooner. I also setup my router to give me a static IP address, thanks Brian.