Thank you very much for your reply. It makes a little more sense now. I do understand the way client/server architectures work, I am just not sure how UNIX works...I tried reading wikipedia, but it wasn't very helpful, for me anyway!

OK, if I an on machine1, and want to access the harddrive on machine3, does that mean I have to mount the filesystem of machine3 onto machine1? Or something along those lines.

You mentioned hostnames. Is a hostname simply the name of a unix box? Does it mean that each hostname has its own CPU, harddrive, RAM etc?

Thanks.