[ale] Something is Fishy About My Network

[Brian Pitts]

Marc Ferguson wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'm running Fedora 10 x86_64 and I really think something is odd about my
> ability to network and I think it's all pointing to DNS.  First, I've been
> running Linux (full time) for almost a year, but I am still a newb.  There
> are still some Windows concepts that I haven't been able to shake yet, so
> please be very simple yet thorough with your replies (I'd appreciate it).
> 
> So here's the meat of my cry-for-help caserole.
> 
>    - I'm having a problem pinging my hostname.  I'll ping it and 127.0.0.1
>    is the resulting IP.
>    - I see that my router has given my computer an IP address, but it
>    doesn't have the hostname in its table.
>    - I can't ping, by host name, my computer from any other computer on the
>    home network.

All three of these things sound normal to me.

1) 127.0.0.1 is the loopback ip address. [0] If you check your hosts
file at /etc/hosts [1] it should show that your hostname maps to
127.0.0.1 (or maybe 127.0.1.1).

I don't understand how #2 or #3 could work unless you specifically
configured your computers and your router's DNS service to make it
happen. What router and firmware are you using? If your router uses
dnsmasq as its DHCP and DNS server then this will be easy to configure;
otherwise it might be best to go with Jim's suggestion of giving all
your computers static IP addresses and adding the hostnames and
addresses to your hosts file.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopback#Virtual_network_interface
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hosts_file

All the best,
Brian