Even if your machine is not going to be connected to any others, there is still a lot of software available which has been written to use sockets as an inter-process communication mechanism. The socket mechanism is supported by Linux and it is the standard way by which processes on two separate machines can communicate with each other over a network.

Although socket code assumes that the two communicating processes are on separate machines, there is nothing to prevent the communication from taking place between two processes on the same machine.

In order to do this, it only needs to be configured. First, you need to make sure that the networking packages were loaded onto your machine during system installation. If you installed from the Slackware distribution then the N disk set is the one containing the network software.

Next, when you build a new kernel, you just need to include the basic networking options during the make config procedure, though you should not opt to include any of the networking cards themselves, unless you actualy have a network card fitted.

Finally, for many distributions, you just need to run the netconfig command and answer a few simple questions. For a stand alone machine, netconfig will only ask for three pieces of information, these are:

hostname

This is the name you want to give to your machine (strictly, the name is associated with its network interface). The name can be any single word you like. Most people choose something like the dog's name or the name of a fictional character or a role play character, Wendy, for example.





domain name

This is the name of the network to which the machine is connected. If your machine is to be stand alone then the choice here is just academic and it is probably simplest just to provide a single word something like mynet perhaps.





loopback

This is where the choice for a stand alone machine is made. A stand alone machine can use only local loopback so you will enter yes as the answer to this question.

By this stage, the netconfig program has all the information it needs to configure the system just for networking with local loopback only, and no further questions need to be asked. Your machine's full network name is given as the hostuame followed by the domain name, and given the previous example values, this would appear as follows:

	wendy.mynet

Next: TCP/IP

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