Cannot instantiate weblogic.entitlement.data.ldap.EData

We got an interesting failure on WebLogic startup:

Cannot instantiate weblogic.entitlement.data.ldap.EData
null
java.lang.ExceptionInInitializerError
 at com.octetstring.vde.util.guid.GuidGenerator.nextGuidInBytes(GuidGenerator.java:125)
 at com.octetstring.vde.util.guid.Guid.(Guid.java:84)
 at com.octetstring.vde.backend.standard.BackendStandard.add(BackendStandard.java:379)
 at com.octetstring.vde.backend.BackendHandler.add(BackendHandler.java:460)
 at weblogic.ldap.EmbeddedLDAPConnection.add(EmbeddedLDAPConnection.java:1152)
 Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace

Caused By: java.lang.NullPointerException
 at java.lang.System.arraycopy(Native Method)
 at com.octetstring.vde.util.guid.GuidParamGenerator.generateNodeID(GuidParamGenerator.java:47)
 at com.octetstring.vde.util.guid.GuidStateManager.initializeGUIDParameters(GuidStateManager.java:59)
 at com.octetstring.vde.util.guid.GuidStateManager.(GuidStateManager.java:30)
 at com.octetstring.vde.util.guid.GuidStateManager.(GuidStateManager.java:23)
 Truncated. see log file for complete stacktrace

The getLocalHost test failed:

bash-3.2$ cat TestMe.java
 import java.net.InetAddress;
 import java.net.UnknownHostException;

public class TestMe {
 public static void main(String[] args) throws UnknownHostException 
{ System.out.println(InetAddress.getLocalHost()); } 
}

javac TestMe.java 
 java -cp . TestMe

Exception in thread "main" java.net.UnknownHostException: date: date
 at java.net.InetAddress.getLocalHost(InetAddress.java:1430)
 at TestMe.main(TestMe.java:6)

It turned out that "hostname" prints "date" , instead of the actual hostname
Checking into the usual files /etc/hosts /etc/inet/hosts /etc/hostname.vnet0 /etc/hostname.vnet1 (it's a Solaris box) didn't reveal anything strange.
Up to the OS specialist to fix it.