[Lilux-help] addresses resolution

hi, I'm trying actually to do a very simple network including two laptops connected with an ethernet cable (no gateway nor internet access) but I'm so unexperimented that I need some light from specialists... So, my problem is after configurate interfaces on both machines (using static numeric IP addresses) is that i don't find any physical addresses in tables (arp -a return nothing) and I don't know how arp resolves physical addresses, is there any automatical way to proceed or should i do it manually i.e. with command arp -s...and then what address to put in...well I've a book on TCP/IP but an old one, they speak about the commanf netconfig which is apparently no more available on recent linux versions...Any suggestion is welcome. Thank you in advance cheers M. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what you�re looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com