Act one: recitative "my server as a DHCP client"

the manuals say it's so easy. all you have to do is the following:

# touch /etc/hostname.hme2
# touch /etc/dhcp.hme2

reboot and you're done.
Which I did.

And cursed.

And cursed again.

I always forget that solaris doesn't stick to it's own hostname when it has DHCP configured addresses. And since windows clients do, no ISP in their right mind provides a hostname over DHCP. Endresult: the hostname is set to "unknown".

So: my initial attempt was to put the hostname in /etc/nodename.
In my opinion, an IP-address is tied to an interface. When naming them, I prefer to have some logical description as their name. in this case: the ip-address on hme2 should be associated with "dc-utr01-ext" which is short for "the external (ISP facing) interface in my datacenter in Utrecht, location #1"
A bit over the top for just a single box, but hey. think big.
following the same logic, I assigned hme2 a static address and name: "dc-utr01-int". This makes for easy interpretation of lots of network stuff like network snoops, dhcp server, firewall rules etc etc

So I did:

# echo "dc-utr01-ext" > /etc/nodename
and rebooted.

Only to find out that when I log in, the hostname has changed to this as well!
e.g.:
# uname -a
SunOS dc-utr01-ext 5.10 Generic_118822-30 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2

that doesn't make sense at all! It's ugly!

At this point I left it for what it was and went for some sleep.