Help: Aliasing hosts? Can it be done?

I'm forwarding this question for a co-worker whose posting service is not working: ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Greetings: I am an Informix developer who has become an Informix On-line DBA by default and I have the following question. Running on-line in a distributed environment, can you alias your hostname to another name? In my example, I am trying to alias the hostname, betty, to a new name, barney. so given the database name biw, i want to be able on the server to: dbaccess biw@betty # or dbaccess biw@barney where betty and barney both reference the same server. Given: hostname is betty and /etc/hosts looks like: # /etc/hosts 127.0.0.1 localhost 160.0.0.106 betty barney #and even /etc/hosts.equiv on betty barney # and my sqlhosts file currently looks like: #dbservername nettype hostname servicename betty tcp betty starbetty # and /etc/services starbetty 1549/tcp I have tried setting up a starbarney with a different port address and even trying the $INFORMIXDIR/lib/sqlexecd with the starbarney argument. I keep getting the following error message: 931: Cannot locate sqlexec service/tcp service in /etc/services. on the client. Any help would be appreciated. regards, ed schaefer ----------------------------------------------------------------------------