Whenever i type 'hostname -i' in the terminal , i get 'hostname lookup failure' error.Help me out with this problem....

hostname -i should just show you your IP address.
Have you set the IP in ifcfg-eth0 and in your /etc/hosts file?

What do you get if you type ifconfig?

here is the output from my /etc/hosts file

[root@conganode1 etc]# cat hosts
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
::1 localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6
192.168.146.131 congaheadnote
192.168.146.132 conganote1


Here is output that I type in ifconfig

[root@conganode1 etc]# ifconfig
eth0 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:0C:29:AD:48:1A
inet addr:192.168.146.132 Bcast:192.168.146.255 Mask:255.255.255.0
inet6 addr: fe80::20c:29ff:fead:481a/64 Scope:Link
UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:4203 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:3267 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:4330849 (4.1 MiB) TX bytes:456168 (445.4 KiB)
Interrupt:67 Base address:0x2024

It seems there is no hostname associated with the IP in the output from my ifconfig

Please help. I used DHCP not static IP to configure my network card. And this is the test machine running on vmworkstation, and there is no DNS has been configure.

Thank you for the time and help.

Best,

If you are logged in to "conganode1" and want that to resolve to localhost (127.0.0.1), add "conganode1" to the end of the 127.0.0.1 entry. I would also remove the other conganode1 entry, as it will confuse your system and cause network traffic that should go through the loopback device to be routed strangely ...