Eucalyptus without a DNS

It has been a while that I last blog relating to my research. I went to my home country (Sri Lanka) for the winter break and came back in mid January. After coming here I just realized that I need a big vacation again :). I had to finish a lot of pending work and now back on track and I can blog again. Still it is 1.56 am in the morning :)

I just got a set of Xen VMs running with Eucalyptus after a few hours of debugging to fix the following warning that I got when I try to ssh between the VM instances.
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get_socket_address: getnameinfo 8 failed: Name or service not known
userauth_hostbased: cannot get local ipaddr/name
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Actually, it has nothing to do with the VM usage but something I have missed in configuring host based authentication using ssh.

Since it could be helpful to someone else, let me describe the problem and the solution.
I was trying to start a set of VM instances using a Eucalyptus cloud that has been setup in a iDataplex cluster here at Indiana. I was able to follow the guidelines and start the VMs.

Then my goal is to run a set of MPI applications on these VMs. To get MPI working, I need to have password less login between the nodes. As I have previously configured this in the VM image things worked fine but it gave the above warning when I try login between nodes, which then stops MPI daemons from starting.

When I used these VM images with Eucalyptus public cloud every VM instance got assigned a static IP. So, setting up any DNS was not required. This time, however, we use only one static IP for one of the nodes of the VM instances while the rest have dynamic IPs. Also there is no DNS setup for these VM instances. This causes the above warning when I try to login between the nodes using ssh.

Joe Rinkovsky a Unix Systems Specialist @ Indiana explained me the fix. I need to add (IP , name) pairs to /etc/hosts file of the head node of the VM instances. The solution is explained here under "make sure name resolution works" which I haven't noticed till today :).