Strange login error message
 

Forgive me if this has come up before, or is oft repeated, but I wasn't able to find anything on google about it and I thought I'd ask.

I'm fairly new to Linux (Red Hat 9) and after intalling sucessfully and using Linux for a while, I stopped using it for about a month because I was busy with some music projects that required my windows PC. I just recently came back to my linux box and, after logging in (as any user or root, it doesn't affect the error), I get an error message that says:
----------
Could not look up internet address for x1-6-00-0c-41-1c-ef-48.
This will prevent GNOME from operating correctly.
It may be possible to correct the problem by adding
x1-6-00-0c-41-1c-ef-48 to the file /etc/hosts.

LOGIN ANYWAY or TRY AGAIN (my choices of button to click)
------------

Does anyone have any insight as to what this might mean? Has anyone encountered this before? I tried editing the /etc/hosts file and I added the "x1-6-00-0c-41-1c-ef-48", though I don't think that's what it wanted me to do because it had no effect on the error message.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

-Post

If it's any consolation, you can still work fine by clicking on
Login Anyways.

x1-6-00-0c-41-1c-ef-48

If this is your machines eth MAC address,
try adding:
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost

to the file /etc/hosts