The specific problem I'm having is that of the virtual 'clients', only one of them is getting assigned an IP address from the list in /etc/hosts. 'asmodean', running Ubuntu 9.10 gets its IP address of 10.0.0.2 as planned. The other two, demandred (running F12+LXDE) and lanfear (running Debian 5.03 Lenny), get randomly assinged IP addresses from the pool defined in dnsmasq.conf (10.0.0.50-10.0.0.100) like one would normally expect for a *dynamically* assigned lease. Except I wanted them to get fixed leases based on /etc/hosts.
Monte,
You need to ensure that the clients are sending the hostname in the dhcp request. Your dnsmasq logs will show it, usually in /var/log/messages, and if you want you can enable extra logging for dnsmasq to show u exactly what options are being sent by the clients.
If i remember correctly Debian doesn't but i would have thought Fedora would have by default.
You can do it by adding "send host-name <insert hostname here>" to the dhclient.conf.
Alternatively, you can just assign the static IP using the client MAC in the dnsmasq.conf. You will have the MAC from the dnsmasq logs so you can just copy and paste.
Ben