Comment 4 for bug 52335

I was able to reproduce this on Ubuntu 8.10 with package hostname version 2.95.
Results from terminal:

me@:~$ sudo hostname airhead
sudo: unable to resolve host
me@:~$ hostname
airhead
me@:~$ sudo hostname ''
hostname: the specified hostname is invalid
me@:~$ hostname

me@:~$

Contents of /etc/hostname
me@airhead:~$ more /etc/hostname
airhead
me@airhead:~$