People are sometimes confused about why their network connections aren't working. Here is a brief guide to the basic files that Linux uses for networking(there may be others depending on the distribution you're using):

/etc/hosts

This file contains the IP and names of other hosts. One essential line is for the loopback:

127.0.0.1  localhost

/etc/hostname

This contains the hostname of the computer.

/etc/resolv.conf

This file helps determine how IP addresses should be resolved. It may contain the 'domain' keyword to indicate how short names should be expanded and the 'nameserver' keyword to specify what nameservers the computer should use.

/etc/networks

This lists the networks known to the computer. For example:

loopback 127.0.0.0
localnet 10.0.0.0

/etc/host.conf

This file determines how IP addresses should be resloved. It typically looks something like this:

order hosts, bind
multi on

The 'order' key word may be followed by 'hosts', 'bind' or 'nis'. In this example, the computer will first look in the '/etc/hosts' file before looking up the name using bind.

/etc/hosts.allow

A list of hosts that may access the machine

/etc/hosts.deny

A list of hosts that may not access the machine

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