[plug] (Probably) Basic Network question

[Garry]

Like most, I enjoy playing with Linux, and gaining knowledge by doing it.
But as I have always thought the best way to "know" something is to understand
it, I've found a stumbling block which I'd love to get my head around..

By default, the distributions I've seen give you "localhost.localdomain". On
every machine.

So if you have two machines, call them groundcontrol and majtom. Do we refer to
both of them as hosts? Do they become groundcontrol.localhost.localdomain or
groundcontrol.localdomain?

In my /etc/hosts file, I have:

127.0.0.1  groundcontrol  localhost.localdomain localhost

I assume that the last entry is an alias, for internal use.

But if you designate a name to a machine, do we end up losing the
localhost.localdomain somewhere along the line? This just gets confusinger and
confusinger.

Perhaps the best way, if someone wouldn't mind, is to post the relevant files
from two networked machines, with the info e.g. 192.178.0.1 is "Bob", and
192.178.0.34 is "Fred", to put some context into it. I have looked, but i can't
find a set of files for a pair of computers.

And finally, if we make one machine the gateway with diald, do we need to worry
about changing the domain or setting it? Or do they stay as just peers on a
network with one having the "gateway" setting sorted?

I can see that penny, it is a simple penny, but it just wont drop!

Thanks in advance..

Garry.