What's wrong with my host name?

I'm brand new to slrn from years of using Agent under wine
but I'm getting this error message when starting slrn.

Reading startup file /home/lba/.slrnrc.***Warning: Unable to find a 
unique fully-qualified host name.
             slrn will not generate any Message-IDs.




My ~/.slrnrc was created starting
from the sample file and includes:

set username "labradley"
set hostname "mindspring.com"
set realname "larrya"

along with lines for
server "news.west.earthlink.net" ".jnewsrc-el"
nnrpaccess "news.west.earthlink.net" "[email protected]" "secret"
set server_object "spool"
set post_object "slrnpull"
set save_posts "News/My_Posts"
set save_replies "News/My_Replies"
set failed_posts_file "dead.letter"
set save_directory "News"
set scroll_by_page 1
set highlight_unread_subjects 1
set highlight_urls 1


My email addy for mail lists is
[email protected]

I've gone through the alrn --create step but when I run slrn normally
this is the error message:

Reading startup file /home/lba/.slrnrc.***Warning: Unable to find a 
unique fully-qualified host name.
             slrn will not generate any Message-IDs.


My understanding of the host name is that is is created from the above 
username and hostname.  What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,
Larry
-- 
Larry Alkoff N2LA - Austin TX
Using Thunderbird on Linux

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by DB2 Express
Download DB2 Express C - the FREE version of DB2 express and take
control of your XML. No limits. Just data. Click to get it now.
http://sourceforge.net/powerbar/db2/