Crossover cable connection between 2 computers.

[Mike Shaw]

Actually you don't need to mess with even setting up a DHCP server
unless you really need/want one.  If you just have 2 machines and 1
NIC per machine just plug the cable in connecting the machines, assign
IPs and a default route per machine from the command line and you are
set.  Some thing like:

Machine 1
---------------
% sudo /etc/init.d/networking stop
% ifconfig eth0 inet 192.168.1.1 netmask 255.255.255.0
% route add default 192.168.1.2
% ifconfig eth0 up


Machine 2
----------------
% sudo /etc/init.d/networking stop
% ifconfig eth0 inet 192.168.1.2 netmask 255.255.255.0
% route add default 192.168.1.1
% ifconfig eth0 up

Now you should be able to ping, ssh, ftp whatever, providing the
hardware is okay.  To get things back to normal just issue:

% ifconfig eth0 down
% route del default
% sudo /etc/init.d/networking start

on each machine and they should go back.

l8r,

Mike