On NetBSD 1.4.1 (waiting for 1.4.3 ;-) dhclient returns the hostname in 
"hex-string" format. ie.

Given a host name "alpha", dhclient returns "61:6c:70:68:61" via the 
$new_host_name environment variable.

This is in comparison to encoding of domain name which is in plain text. ie.

Given a domain name "nemostar", dhclient returns "nemostar" via the 
$new_domain_name environment variable.

The environment variables are made available via the "dhclient-script" 
script.

Is there a particular reason why dhclient does encode the host name this 
way? Is there a system utility to convert to plain text?

Is there a particular reason why dhclient does not set the system host name 
and the system domain name? Am I missing something?

If this a bug I will gladly lodge a PR (just need the classification).

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Stephen Welker