on 2004-03-06, in <slrnc4k8r2.i5.joostkremers@j.kremers4.news.arnhem .chello.nl>,
these words of wisdom from Joost Kremers did appear:
> [Followup-To: header set to alt.os.linux.slackware]
> Rich Grise wrote:
>> -------------------------<end quote>------------------------------
>> I wonder who the hell 10.253.117.* are?
>
> 10.*.*.*, like 192.168.*.*, is a range reserved for private use. machines
> with such addresses cannot be directly connected to the internet, they need
> to go through masquerading/NAT.
>
>> And I don't remember what
>> "arp" stands for. Address Resolution Protocol?
>
> yes:
>
><http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/0,,sid9_gci213780,00.html>

Thanks! Yes, I know about masquerading; Right now there's lessee ...
4 computers on the subnet.

I've got a leases file showing a whole bunch of leases; only a couple
of computers are on right now. I plan to make a subnet or two. There's
a diagram at
http://home.earthlink.net/~entheos_e...ntheos_LAN.gif .

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention - bellerophon used to be ABI-Ops, but
I've repartitioned and it's exclusively Slack 9.1 now.

My holy Bob sakes alive. of my 3 computers and Joe's, there are
two running nothing but Linux.

Oh, and Real Soon Now, if anybody asks for it, I'll post bellerophon's
/var/log/packages, or at least count the packages. It's an absolute
bare-bones server. At the moment, bellerophon has thunderbird's monitor,
and I'm at vehicle with a ssh open on thunderbird. entheos is just sitting there
with earthlink's ftp client, and several other apps. open.

So, do those numbers look logical? (ip #s with ?'s) I'm going to have
to make some kind of truth table to learn what netmasks really do, and
I think I'll have to get out the scientific calculator to figure out how
many ways there are to connect these 4 computers together. Oh, yeah.
Vehicle, Entheos, Thunderbird, and Bellerophon are all in my office.
Boogeyman, ABI-Ofc1, ABI-Quality, and ABI-Chief are up front.

So, In my saga, I've got to the point of looking at DNS, thinking without
a hosts file, where do apps know where to send their stuff? Well, there's
a dhcp.leases file, and it's got hostnames - I haven't determined
yet if <whatever app or daemon needs an IP> gets the name from the
/etc/hosts file, from /etc/HOSTNAME, or from DHCP_HOSTNAME, but having
seen the hostname in the /var/state/dhcp/dhcpd.leases file, I'm wondering,
is there just some switch in the config file such that those hostnames in
the leases file get exposed? (Y'know, so ping bellerophon and so on will
work.)

Thanks,
Rich