[K12OSN] infamous grey X bug

[Sonny To]

Hi,
I am stuck at the grey X. Many people have had this problem too. I
went through the check list at
http://www.ltsp.org/documentation/ltsp-4.1/ltsp-4.1.3-en.html

GDM is running and enabled set to true. The problem I think is with /etc/host
when using the "host" utlity to lookup host, it always looks at dns
and now the /etc/host file

for example, my /etc/host entry is
ws1.ltsp        192.168.1.101 ws1
ws2.ltsp        192.168.1.100 ws2

but doing an host or nslookup on ws1.ltsp returns
Host ws1.ltsp not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)

my /etc/host.conf is
order hosts,bind

which should first look at /etc/hosts. Is this a bug with Fedora 5?

I have two NIC. One for external network (eth1) and one for thin
client network (eth0)
dhcpd is running on eth0 serving ip address to the thin client.

Since this problem is so common. A tool to help pin point the problem
would be extremely useful. /var/log/messages doesn't have any useful
information.

thanks for any help.
Sonny