posted
My iBook seems to have set its hostname to something including my office's domain without my asking it to. In fact, I'm reasonably sure that it's taken somebody else's hostname, since it has the guy's name in it. (To make it slightly more concrete, my computer has decided to name itself something like davelaptop.businessname.com, where dave is replaced with the guy's actual name and businessname with my company's actual domain name.) Why is it doing that, and how to I get it to stop?
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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This is despite the fact that just above those settings I have the computer name actually set to "mikelaptop".
I also noticed that last night after I went home--and was away from my office wireless network--my computer was showing the correct name after I rebooted.
Posts: 4534 | Registered: Jan 2003
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posted
Hmm... Thats very weird. What it should show is either your local network ip... 192.168.1.2 or something like that, or computername.local and/or localhost for some of them.
Have you tried closing down all your sharing options and starting them back up?
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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posted
Best guess is you acquired that computer's IP through DNS at some point, and your computer then started thinking it had that computer's old hostname.
It is possible to set your hostname manually, but that would likely just cause hassle whenever you moved between networks.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Alcon -- no, it should show whatever hostname it has acquired through DNS, which is usually one of the ones you listed, but definitely not exclusively.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Yeah, I know there's a file in the /etc somewhere--/etc/hosts or /etc/hostnames or something--that'll let me manually configure it, but I thought there might be some checkbox or something in the System Preferences that I was overlooking.
posted
We've observed this behavior on many of our Macs using DHCP, too. They appear to do reverse lookups on the IP they're provided to determine their hostname, rather than the other way around. This is incredibly baffling, and I can only assume that it has something to do with the fact that we have Windows DHCP servers.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Uh, Tom, you have windows computers that choose their IP based on the hostname they're assigned?
Every computer does this sort of lookup, however I think the reason macs tend to have this sort of problem is due to some sort of interplay with Rendezvous and/or a local DNS cache.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
"Uh, Tom, you have windows computers that choose their IP based on the hostname they're assigned?"
No. What I mean is that when our Macs authenticate to a Macintosh DHCP server, we don't see this behavior. When they authenticate to our Windows DHCP servers, they often pull down the DNS name of the last Windows machine to authenticate to that IP.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote:They appear to do reverse lookups on the IP they're provided to determine their hostname, rather than the other way around.
because it sure sounded like that's what you were sayin' .
I'm pretty certain its what I suspect, even more so now in fact. You see, Rendezvous takes advantage of some esoteric capabilities in DNS that most DNS servers ignore/don't bother to implement or the like. Rendezvous sets up a DNS network without the need for a DNS server, even if one is there. This can create some interesting behaviors. I predict some unexpected DNS persistence occurs because of an interplay between Rendezvous and what MS's DNS server does, which apple, having control over the behavior of their DNS server, made sure didn't happen, and likely considered it more useful to get something in particular out of Rendezvous than to accomodate this particular quirk.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
The "other way 'round" I meant was having a computer, upon receiving an IP from DHCP, register its name with DNS. Rather than checking DNS to figure out what its name should be.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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