Giving remote machines names

Host Names

People don't cope with remembering numbers very well. Particularly a large number of them (both people, and numbers).

TCP/IP based systems allow the association of names with IP addresses, to allow people to use the name of a machine, not its IP address.

These names are called Host names.

There are 3 ways of associating a name with an IP address :

• Add an entry into the /etc/hosts file

• Add an entry into the Domain Name Server

• Add an entry into the Sun Network Information Service (Yellowpages)

This simplest way is to add an entry into the /etc/hosts file.

/etc/hosts

The /etc/hosts file is a text file containing mappings between IP addresses and host names.

Each line in the /etc/hosts file has the following format :

<IP Address> <hostname>

You can add as many entries as you like to this file, for both local and remote machines.