Here's a fairly vague analysis ... Surely someone can just hit this nail on the head ... anyone?
On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 09:30:23PM -0500, Hal Ashburner wrote: > I'm writing from my parent's box which is running RH9 & Gnome on the > desktop, which incidentally as self-proclaimed 'proud luddites' they > both absolutely love using in comparison to the other computing > alternatives they have tried previously. > > The box hooks up to the net with Telstra big pond cable, which goes > ok. My problem is this, I once hooked up my laptop running debian to > the same modem, which then seemed to re-name the connection to > 'debian' the login screen on red hat said "welcome to debain" then I'm not sure I understand this bit. Which login screen do you mean? If you mean the main one into the window manager, then it looks like you have set the hostname to debian. > logging into gnome said it was unable to resolve 'debian' and to add > debian to /etc/hosts. (which I did) Sounds like this was just a guess by gnome or some program, and you probably don't really want that. How did you set up the connection on each machine? > I then booted Gnoppix on their box to see how that went, > and the connection was renamed credativ You must mean Knoppix ;) They might use "credativ" as the hostname ... I don't think so ... This might be a bit strange. Otherwise where are all these names coming from I wonder? > and the same error message. > Obviously I have no clue about what I'm doing here, ideally I'd like > to be able to give the connection/computer a name on boot from RH9 > something like "Mum & Dad's box" or just "Ashburner" Any suggestions? :) "ashburner" would be a good choice. Look out for spaces and fancy characters in hostnames. I prefer shortish lowercase hostnames. The computer name is the hostname, and that should be fixed. I'm not sure what kind of name the connection needs. Do you know how you first set that? What did you use to set up the cable on each distro? Are you running a local network? I'm also not quite sure what is going on. However, I'd suggest that the hosts file(s) might have something to do with it. What I would do is post any network configuration you have to the list, especially the contents of /etc/hostname, /etc/hosts, /etc/network/interfaces (debian specific?) or whatever the redhat equivalent to that is, and let the cable experts on the list fix them up for you. There is much more to explain but I think we'd better find a bit more about the question. You might do well to check out Chapter 8 of the Redhat 9 Reference: http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/linux/RHL-9-Manual/ref-guide/ 144.136.71.171 is your (assigned) static IP address, on the interface (likely eth1 or eth0) that is connected to the cable modem. FWIW you might try some things like this: On the redhat machine: /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost 144.136.71.171 ashburner ashburner.domain.if.you.have.one You might not need that second line. Also, /etc/hostname: ashburner > 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost > debian hostname.domain.com > Link > 144.136.71.171 debian hostname.domain.com > Link > 144.136.71.171 credativ hostname.domain.com And was that an exact copy of /etc/hosts? I don't recognise the "Link" lines, I'm sure they shouldn't be there ... Patrick Lesslie -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
