[9fans] Newby Question on setting hostname

["Daryl M" <glenda@mc2research.org>]

Greetings,

I spent time this weekend experimenting with, and learning about,
configuring my Plan9 machine as a simple,
DHCP client, terminal.  Networking now seems to work reliably: DNS is
resolving names, I can ping machines
locally and across the internet by both name and IP address.  I can also
connect to sources at bell labs and
browse them.  Timezone has been set and I even created another user though I
am not yet happy with the
results so have more to learn in that area.

Now, I want to set the machine's name.  From the Plan9 Wiki and searching
through the 9fans archives I now know:
          1) Editing /rc/bin/termrc to replace the default name, gnot, with
my machine's name is "not the right way".
          2) A post from earlier this year just said to edit /lib/ndb/local
and that there were plenty of examples.
	In reality, the only examples are for machines with static IP
addresses.
          3) A post from 2007 said to add an entry to /lib/ndb/local of the
form:
	  sys=<machinename>    ether=<MACaddress>
	Replacing <machinename> with the desired name of my machine and
replacing <MACaddress>
	with that machine's MAC address.  This works 	fine, but it could
get a bit unwieldy for configuring large
	numbers of machines.
          4) Another post said to just
	  echo -n <machinename> > /dev/sysname
	in /rc/bin/termrc.local.  I tested it and it also works fine and
seems to be the easiest.

My question is: What is the REAL preferred method for setting the machine
name?  #1, #3, #4, or something else?

Thank you,
Daryl M