MAC Address instead of ip

[James Ward]

I'm running RH 7 on a cogeco cable modem with a pci nic. Everything works ok except sometimes instead of getting my ip address as a hostname I get the MAC Address of my NIC. Some progs find this hostname too long and fail as a result. e.g. my normal prompt whould be something like root@mymachine: /root# but when the MAC address thing happens I get something like root@x1-6-01-06-00-50-ba-42-df-50: /root#. I have my ip matched to mymachine in the /etc/hosts file. Is there a similar way to match up MAC address' so I can avoid this problem?

[bdg1983]

What is in /etc/HOSTNAME?

[James Ward]

The contents of st/HOSTNAME is
localhots.localdomain

For some reason the problem has stopped. My ip address changed and cogeco is giving me a hostname similar to d141-52-12 where the last digits are the last digits in my ip address seperated by hyphens. Maybe the MAC Address thing was a fallback for my soon to expire ip? Thanks anyway.