Time for a moment of geeky happiness!
I figured out how to set the hostname on an OS X box. (For those of you who'd like to know, it seems to come from a file called /etc/hostconfig. There's a setting for hostname that is set to -AUTOMATIC- by default). This is one of my main gripes with OS X. While they have made a very usable unix for the desktop, they did do some kinda wacky things that just aren't quite standard, and it confuses this old sysadmin.