All, Thanks for the help. I will be playing about with network configuration when I return from an upcoming stint of travel around the United States. I have made some half-hearted attempts to get samba working a couple of times with no success. I am steeling myself to dive in until *everything* works as it should. With three different computing platforms I expect it to be a bit of a battle. I have been so delighted with my dual monitor box that I want to go all the way and start serving X sessions across my home network. The big monitors on my sun boxes take up too much room in my computer room; I want to run them headless. The dream: a single workstation with multiple monitors displaying multiple X windows controlling my 'vast armada' of computing hardware - it will be cool! As far as the self deprecation thing, for as long as I have been playing with *nix I really think I should have picked this stuff up by now. I recognize the source of the problem as intellectual laziness and I am not comfortable with that; I guess that it's a personal thing. It spills out in the writing without even trying. As frustrating as it is, with any self-directed learning adventure it is necessary to accept that you learn what you are interested in and that tends to leave holes in the knowledge landscape. An instructor guided course has the possibility of leaving the student with a more comprehensive grasp of a subject. My Bass playing; funny thing that. I do play the bass. There is a fellow in Minneapolis that also plays and he has played for Prince and a few other name brand acts. I get calls trying to get me to join various musical endeavors. I have toyed with the idea of taking the gig but I am sure that it would turn out poorly; my influence runs more to the Pink Floyd bass style. Not his thing from what I can tell. Mark Browne -----Original Message----- From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org] On Behalf Of Bob Hartmann Sent: Sunday, April 03, 2005 1:48 AM Cc: tclug-list at mn-linux.org Subject: Re: [tclug-list] Stupid newbie question Quite right. localhost is just a name. It's also a convention that administrators rely upon.. any number of names can be pointed to the same IP address in /etc/hosts, as I've already illustrated (weakly) in this thread. Mark, you're not retarded, stupid or newbie. Stop insulting yourself. ps. Do you still play bass for that Nelson guy? Justin Krejci wrote: >It doesn't really matter what you call them, though localhost probably is not >the best name to use and you should have every machine with their own name. >The reason it does not matter what names you use is beacuse you are on your >own private network behind a NAT'ing router. > >On Wednesday 30 March 2005 09:01 pm, Mark Browne wrote: > > >>When I set up my linux boxen I have been leaving the domain name as >>localhost. My ISP is Comcast.net and I don't have my own domain name to >>plug in. >> >>I know that this is sort of retarded, but I have no clue about the correct >>thing to do here. >> >>If it makes any difference, I want to network (samba?) my Mandrake-Sun >>Sparc, Mandrake Intel, OS X Mac, AMD-64 XP, and Intel XP boxen together >>later. >> >> >> >>A pointer to a good how-to would be nice. >> >> >> >>Mark Browne >> >> > > > _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota tclug-list at mn-linux.org http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list