Take the 2-minute tour ×  I want to be able to have two Erlang
shells to talk. I'm running on OS X.  I tried the tut17 example
here: http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/lang/erlang/doc/getting_started/co
nc_prog.html  I've also tried:  $ erl -sname foo  and then in a
new Terminal:  $ erl -sname bar  (bar@elife)1>
net_adm:ping(foo@elife).  Any ideas?  share|improve this
question add comment  3 Answers  up vote 8 down vote accepted
It's kind of broken on the mac. By default, the mac can't
resolve its own shortname. Your host's name is really probably
"elife.local".  If you start erl with -name FQDN, then the pings
will work.  ie: you would start it with  $ erl -name
foo@elife.local  this probably could be fixed by making the mac
capable of resolving it's own short name  Here's example output
from my mac. When I do -sname I get the same result as you.  The
first node:  $ erl -name foo@mookie.local  Eshell V5.7.4  (abort
with ^G)  The other node:  $ erl -name bar@mookie.local  Eshell
V5.7.4  (abort with ^G) (bar@mookie.local