ok, soon I'll have 2 PC's, and of course both will have linux as the default OS, what I was thinking of doing is using my 5 foot cat5 cable to connect the two, but once they are connected how do I get them talking to eachother?

is it as simple as having "ifconfig eth0 192.168.0.1 (then 2 on the second comp)" in the startup scripts? or am missing something? keep in mind that there will bo no router or switch between the two.

I will be running webmin and SSH on the one with no monitor/keyboard.

for one make sure u have a crossover cable, regular cat5 straight through wont work.

setting the ips within the same network (like u said) and putting an entry in each /etc/hosts file to map the ip to hostname will work fine

then instead of scp username@192.168.1.2 :...
u can scp username@hostname

(or any other command that needs a remote address).


also make sure the netmasks match and broadcast matches

ifconfig 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255
ifconfig 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.1.255

ok sounds good, but whats the difference between a crossover cable and a regular cat5 cable? is it the length or something more subtle?