> New Topic:
> 
> My computer is suffering from an identity crisis.  It doesn't know who it
> is.  One day I booted my machine and it said that it was n24-c168-170-35.  I
> rebooted it a couple of weeks later and is said it was RedHat, a couple of
> weeks after that I rebooted and it said that it was nic-c168-163-40.  The
> first and last times are permutations of my ip address assigned by Mediaone.
> The one in the middle I have no idea where it came from.  The trouble is I
> have two other computers that have network drives like to it, so every time
> the name changes, I have to fix the drive paths.  My hosts file in /etc
> lists the computer as RedHat.  The RedHat box has two nics in it, one for
> internet and other for lan.

Let me guess... Are you using DHCP to obtain your computer's IP 
address? If so, then I'd bet that the computer is gleaning it's 
hostname from the host (first) part of the assigned IP address. This 
means that every time you get a new IP address, your hostname 
changes. The RedHat designator may just have happened when 
the ifup script failed to get the hostname from the IP address. 
Since linux doesn't like a null hostname, it just probably just 
assigned "RedHat" when it couldn't figure out what else to do.

As far as setting the hostname to be static... I suppose it could be 
done. You'd have to edit the DHCP startup scripts so that they 
didn't update the /etc/hostname file everytime you got a new IP 
though. However, I'm not sure that this would fix your drive mapping 
problems.

I don't know a heck of alot about DHCP on linux, so probably 
someone else could provide some more concrete information.


Ben E.
-----
Benjamin Exley
Online Webmaster
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bexley at daily.umn.edu
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