Sounds to me like he's trying to set his hostname... and as long as Red Hat 9 is the distro here's the basic steps:
add the hostname to /etc/hosts (my box is named spork so here's my /etc/hosts file)
# Do not remove the following line, or various programs
# that require network functionality will fail.
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost spork
as the warning says don't remove the localhost.localdomain localhost (very bad things happen)
step 2:
edit /etc/sysconfig/network and add a HOSTNAME= line
my /etc/sysconfig/network file:
NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=Spork
Then you should be able to restart networking and have your hostname set.
service network restart