Pump has been upgraded to support the -h option to supply a hostname, as referenced in bug 2477. Unfortunately this change is not sufficient in and of itself to have pump work properly on some @Home systems (in my case, Comcast@Home in the Baltimore MD service area). I have identified the root cause of the problem and have a tentative fix for it. The problem appears to be that pump-0.7.2-2 always sends an initial DHCP discover message without any options (hostname or otherwise), apparently in an attempt to be compliant with the relevant DHCP RFC; only if pump receives a DHCP offer in response to this initial message will it go on to send a message with options (including hostname if specified). Unfortunately the DHCP servers on my local @Home network ignore this initial discover message (presumably because the message does not contain a hostname) and do not respond to it; pump then retries sending the initial optionless discover message and eventually times out with a failure to configure the interface. See <URL:http://www.hecker.org/misc/dhcp-athome/> for tcpdump data and syslog messages (at DEBUG level) from such an unsuccessful attempt. I was able to get pump to work on my local @Home network by hacking in a new command line option --skip-initial-discover; see the URL above for the diffs. If included on the command line this new option causes pump to skip sending the initial optionless discover message and immediately send a discover message with options. (This is the same message that would have been sent as the second discover message in "normal" operation.) This mode of operation appears to work properly: the @Home DHCP servers respond to the discover message with options, and the interface is configured correctly and can be used; see the URL referenced above for tcpdump data and syslog messages from a successful attempt. This may not be the best fix possible. The best way to do this in general may be to try the initial discover message a few times, and then if unsuccessful (i.e., no response was made) fall back to sending a discover message with options. This would remove the need for a special command line, although it may not be totally compliant with the DHCP RFC. If the need for a command line option remains then you need to make corresponding changes to /sbin/ifup to include the option when invoking pump.
Thanks for the details on this -- it's all fixed in pump 0.7.8, which is available from ftp://people.redhat.com/ewt