[vishnu]

So for example if your network is 192.168.0. - you should be able to ftp to any host on that subnet, 'ftp 192.168.0.100' for example. If you have the hostname for 192.168.0.100 in your /etc/hosts file, you can ftp to the hostname instead of the IP address. That's basically the reason hostnames exist in the IP protocol,  because people find it much easier to remember names than numbers.