I'm trying to set up a cluster of 2, 3 or 4 CentOS VMware machines so that they can communicate with each other; the main idea is that I should be able to ping one machine's IP address from the other. (I am running them in VMware Workstation.)
For example, if I call one machine "red" and the second one "blue", I log in as "root" on the "red" machine and edit /etc/hosts as follows:
127.0.0.1 localhost (this line is already in there)
::1 localhost (this is already there too)
198.168.81.128 red
198.168.81.129 blue
I then log in as "root" on the "blue" machine and add the same lines to its /etc/hosts file. I also go to /etc/sysconfig and edit the 'network' file to include 'hostname=red' (on the "red" machine) and 'hostname=blue' (of course on the "blue" machine).
However, when I run "ping red" (on "red"), it doesn't come back with anything; same thing if I run "ping blue" (on the "red" machine). So I ran "ifconfig" and see that the output for the "eth0" port includes the IP (inet) of 192.168.81.128. So I guess that's what I should put in /etc/hosts.
I also tried to bind IPs to each machine by creating multiple ifcfg-eth0:X files (e.g. ifcfg-eth0:0, ifcfg-eth0:1, etc.) in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts directory on "red"; then I copied the "red" VMware CentOS machine to three other machines (so that they'd have the same files). But when I go into "blue" and try to ping "red", it says it's unreachable. Even pinging itself ("ping blue") is unreachable. (Remember, it has the same /etc/hosts file as "red".) I think one illustration of the problem is that I run "ifconfig | more" on the "blue" machine and it just comes back with what looks like a MAC address for port "eth0", not an IP. This is because I only see HWaddr on the first line and inet6 address on the second line of the eth0 output (whereas the same output on the "red" machine has a specific line of "inet addr: 192.168.81.128 Bcast: 192.168.81.255 [etc.]). You can see the steps I followed at:
http://www.xenocafe.com/tutorials/linux/redhat/bind_multiple_ip_addresses_to_single_nic/index.php
Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!