If you're like me, you've been terribly frustrated by the fact that "hostname name" doesn't permanently set the hostname under MacOS X. After a lot of (unsuccessful) poking around, I finally found a note on the macosx-admin group hosted by omniweb.com.
Edit /etc/hostconfig with your favorite editor. Change the line
HOSTNAME=-AUTOMATIC-
to
HOSTNAME="your favorite name"
Works like a charm! Still, it bugs me that Apple has disabled many of the old unix standards - I think they'd make the platform much more attractive to a very strong unix talent base if they would try to keep the old standards where they still make sense.
Cheers!
Chuck
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20010526191205130