I plan to telnet into my linux (mandrake) box from my PC. but it says it couldn't open connection with port 23. When I check my linux services, I didn't see my telnet server is running.

How do I know if my telent server is installed, if so, how do I get to it?

Also, how do I set up a hostname for my linux box? When I ping this box, I can only use IP address.

Thank you.

Well first of all, let me express to you that telnet is very insecure, anything passed over telnet is in plain text. I'd suggest using ssh instead.

And as for the hostname, you need to have some type of DNS record so your client host that your connecting from can translate Name to IP. If your using another Linux machine, you don't necessarily need DNS but just adding the host to /etc/hosts will do the job.

If your doing it from Windows, I forget the steps to add as I don't muck around with Windows. It's too hard to use in my opinion..

In my host file, I currently have this:
=======================
127.0.0.1 localhost
=======================

Do I append 127.0.0.1 to XYZ hostname?

No, 127.0.0.1 is your loopback address, you need to keep that. It's used locally on the machine.

You need to add a new line that is in the same format for example:

So let's say I have a machine with the IP address of 192.168.1.100 and the hostname with that IP is called goofy and the domain that the host is on is called disneyworld.com, my entry would look like this:

If your not sure what domain your on, just make one up, it won't hurt anything.

Thanks much! I will try it out now.