Terminal Machine Name Different To Actual Machine Name

You might have a custom prompt defined somehow. Try these commands in Terminal:

echo $PROMPT

env

In Terminal do a 'nslookup <your machine's IP-address>'

The answer might be your prompt!

Adam,

question is, how change it? My machine name is not what my prompt says either, and doing nslookup showed in fact that my machine is named "no name". In Tiger, the machine name was what you placed in the "sharing" preference pane.

Weird...

Hmmm... is this in a business environment? Sometimes in an environment with Windows doing the DHCP and DNS the machines register their names in DNS, and when the Mac gets it, the machine name comes down and the Mac uses that. It was easy to manually hardcode in OS X 10.3 and older by editing /etc/hostconfig and setting HOSTNAME but in 10.4 and 10.5 that's not an option.

Double check your "sharing" for Computer name also and ensure the computer name and the local hostname are set... you set the latter with the "edit..." button under the hostname.

This can happen because some LANs offer a domain along with an IP address. It's possible your router is configured to acquire its DNS from a WAN router, or from a local caching system. I have had this problem in the past.

Hello Mathias,

If I remember well the hostname from the Sharing Preferences was put in the /etc/hostconfig file BEFORE Tiger, but migrating to Tiger would leave it there, so that you t h i n k Tiger got it from the Sharing Preferences...

If there was no line like: HOSTNAME=machinename inside /etc/hostconfig then Terminal would go and try to find the name by doing a reverse IP-address-lookup...

Anyway... I just added a line HOSTNAME=blabla inside /etc/hostconfig, rebooted and guess what???

Yes Sir... Terminal would now use that blabla as it's promt.

When (inside Terminal) you type: setenv HOST abc
it would immediately change the prompt to: abc

So it is probably driven by the variable $HOST

The real prompt however is the value of $prompt

When you type: set | grep prompt
You would see: prompt [%m:%c3] %n%#

So to really fix your problem I would use a command like: set prompt = machinename
or try to find out what exactly this [%m:%c3] %n%# stands for...

My comments my be a little csh (C-shell) like...
The man-pages of csh tell us (amoung other things):
%m The hostname up to the first `.'.

So that is were the hostname gets filled in into the prompt.

The prompt-string in sh appears to be inside variables PS1, PS2 etc.

I had the same (read above), but somehow the thing is gone after the 10.5.1 update. So, well...

Lee

What do you get from

grep HOSTNAME /etc/hostconfig

If you get something like "-AUTOMATIC-" that would account for it changing. If you want a fixed one, do as Adam suggested in his post above.

Although William suggested this is not an option in 10.4 and 10.5, it works fine for me, but then I'm in a Mac only environment and a router does the DHCP for me (in fact I think I set it up for fixed IPs).