On Sat, 31 Jan 2004 21:28:26 -0800, linuxquestio wrote:

> Dear experts,
>
> I'm trying to get my two Redhat machines to talk to each other.
>
> They are configured with static IP addresses:
>
> 10.0.0.1 red.testrac.com red
> 10.0.0.2 white.testrac.com white
>
> No DHCP. I also don't have DNS running anywhere.
>
> I thought that the hosts file could substitute for DNS. But neither
> machine can find (ping) the other one.
<snip>

You say "peer to peer" network.. Do you mean machine to machine directly?
Perhaps you need a crossover cable, while you are using regular ethernet
cabling.

As for using /etc/hosts, yes this can substitute for DNS. The reason that
"host" fails, is because it attempts to talk to your DNS server directly,
rather than calling gethostbyname().

HTH,
--
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