I have a fedora box that does not know who it is, but everyone else on the lan knows.

The basic idea is to have the machine with a local (LAN) name but not necessarily visible on the internet.

The box in question shall be called riley_linux for our purposes.
It has a friend, riley_xp, running windows. It is plugged into an ethernet hub and thence to a DSL router.

As it stands:
- riley_linux can browse the www. I am writing you from a browser on that machine.
- My xp machine can view and access smb shares on riley_linux, and vice versa.
- My xp machine can ping riley_linux by name and get an answer. It can also ping riley_linux's ip address and get an answer
- riley_linux can ping machines in the internet beyond the router by name.
- riley_linux can ping localhost and get an answer, either by name or by loopback ip address.

*********************************BUT***********************************
- ping riley_linux or ping riley_linux.localdomain always returns 'unknown host riley_linux'.

--and---

- riley_linux similarly fails to resolve riley_xp and other machines on the lan by name
***********************************************************************
What is going on?

Thanks very much.

Riley

Post the output of following commands:
hostname
cat /etc/hosts

[riley@riley_linux trunk]$ hostname
riley_linux.localdomain
[riley@riley_linux trunk]$ cat /etc/hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost localhost
127.0.0.1 todo
::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6

[riley@riley_linux trunk]$

... even when they are in front of your nose:

[riley@riley_linux trunk]$ ping todo
PING todo (127.0.0.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=0.102 ms
64 bytes from localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=0.052 ms
64 bytes from localhost.localdomain (127.0.0.1): icmp_seq=3 ttl=64 time=0.114 ms


So changing 'todo' to riley_linux should in theory make the machine pingable locally. I did notice, however, that 'ping todo' from the xp machine did not resolve the host, and there is no reason to think that entering a name for riley_linux there will make other hosts on the LAN resolve.

But it is a clue, no?

I read the man page on the hosts file (it might have been a good place to start) and it is clear enough how to assign a name to a machine with a static ip address. In my case however, all the machines are getting ip addresses through dhcp.

So I think the question now becomes: how to assign a hostname when the ip address is coming through DHCP?


Riley