Ok, cool, glad I could help a little anyway 
Ya, Im guessing in mandrake by turning iptables on it probably also activates packet forwarding by default, which will probably send the ssh request right on thru or spend lots of time trying to resolve the proper host, adding the host names and ip's to the /etc/hosts and /etc/networks files will work just fine on a small LAN without a DNS service running(BIND).You can check if packet forwarding is active by checking the value of /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward, if 0 its off, if 1 its on.
Ya, Im guessing in mandrake by turning iptables on it probably also activates packet forwarding by default, which will probably send the ssh request right on thru or spend lots of time trying to resolve the proper host, adding the host names and ip's to the /etc/hosts and /etc/networks files will work just fine on a small LAN without a DNS service running(BIND).You can check if packet forwarding is active by checking the value of /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward, if 0 its off, if 1 its on.
