Shared name of Mac keeps changing

I have the same problem with All my computers.

Cleared system cash, restored permissions, all this is not working.

Apple support has no solution for me (((

As further side-effect I also just got notified by TimeMachine that the old backup isn't reliable anymore and need to start from scratch.

Another problem to solve now.. ;-(

I am certainly no expert on networking matters but I wonder why it is so difficult to locate the source of this “ghost name“ and eradicate it.

I would assume there is a “domain name server“ nested somewhere in the network that replicates the Computername and not in the computer itself although the issue really appeared evident with the upgrade hence it probably IS the computer declaring itself one instance more than requested updating the network name if it finds it's already been taken. Just speculating..

interesting enough, if I open a terminal window, the computername remains correct at the shell cursor; I always get something like: Computername:~ user$ which is correct.

Time to fill in a bug report I guess

Gran Maestro wrote:

Installed Onyx, deleted cache, re-started and renamed computer but in no time i had “mycomputername (2)“ back. %!%°§!?!!

Unfortunately another check on our list that didn't help.

Who is next?.

Careful with the "who is next?" thing: computer problems are not solved by leaps and bounds, but by slow, painstaking baby-steps.

So now the question is this: what device on your network (real of computationally imagined) is taking the "mycomputername" name and forcing the addition of the index?

run this command in terminal: netstat | grep mycomputername

run this command in terminal: netstat | grep mycomputername

I did but it didn't return any result neither using “mycomputername“ nor “mycomputername (2)“

What are we supposed to get?

/P

We can change our computer names all day either with shell scripts, terminal typing or in the Sharing prefs. But... somewhere out there on our network, there's an Apple TV or a Time Capsule that's caching the names. The root problem lies with Apples network devices and something called Bonjour Sleep Proxy.

I have a Time Capsule, an AirPort Extreme, two AirPort Express cubes and an Apple TV on my network. Which of these is the culprit? Or is it all of them?

I don't know if it's a cause or symptom, but when my computer name gets changed, my computer has trouble "finding" my Time Capsule. Multiply this times the four laptops on my network, and we're skipping a heck of a lot of backups. Kinda defeats the purpose of Time Machine and Time Capsule to have it routinely fail because of Bonjour Sleep Proxy caching.

Next up on my kill list is to eliminate Back to My Mac from all my devices. It uses Sleep Proxy to wake stuff up if I connect remotely. I'm switching to TeamViewer anyway.

I don't know if it's a cause or symptom, but when my computer name gets changed, my computer has trouble "finding" my Time Capsule.

I see the same behavior but to an Airport Extreme.

Next up on my kill list is to eliminate Back to My Mac from all my devices

Worth a shot but I don't have Back to My Mac enabled so…

dbengston wrote:

We can change our computer names all day either with shell scripts, terminal typing or in the Sharing prefs. But... somewhere out there on our network, there's an Apple TV or a Time Capsule that's caching the names. The root problem lies with Apples network devices and something called Bonjour Sleep Proxy.

I have a Time Capsule, an AirPort Extreme, two AirPort Express cubes and an Apple TV on my network. Which of these is the culprit? Or is it all of them?

I don't know if it's a cause or symptom, but when my computer name gets changed, my computer has trouble "finding" my Time Capsule.

This is quite interesting. I have a similar setup at home with a Apple-TV ,one TimeCapsule and one AirportExpress and indeed, changing computer name made my TimeCapsule hard to reach by my computer.

I tried first a logout and login but had to restart the computer in order to get normal access to the TimeCapsule again.

Mysteries of OS X..

In all this troubleshooting, it looks like I also found a temporary fix for my issues; instead of constantly renaming the computer I tried to slightly change it's name.

Instead of re-naming it back to “Computername“ I tried “Computernamo“ (just to give an idea). That worked just fine, for the last couple of hours at least.

I noticed however, that all this re-naming doesn't affect the real “hostname“ of my computer as starting a shell window keeps showing the original “Computername“. How comes?

This makes me wonder if that is where the real problem lies, we try changing a name that actually doesn't change.

Is anybody willing to enlighten me with the necessary background theory?

Thanks for sharing the knowledge

/P

well, try just entering netstat. The grep pipe was there to eliminate the gobs of text that netstat returns and just find devices with your particular computer name, but if it's not working you'll have to look through the list by eye and see how many you can find.

Looking at some of the other posts here, though, I'm beginning to suspect that other devices (like an airport base station or a time capsule device) have the same bonjour name as your computer. Have you tried opening the Airport Utility and giving those devices different names, to see if it changes anything? You may have to look elsewhere for non-wireless devices, but every non-passive device will have it's own name and some mechanism for altering it.

mr_bee,

I have been helping people with computer problems for a long, long time, and most of the time people are too intelligent, not idiots. People tend to jump three steps ahead and think in the big picture, and they run into problems because they jump past some seemingly trivial point that has a non-trivial impact. Stepping back, slowing down, and going over old ground may be frustrating, and may not help in all cases, but it doesn't hurt beyond that and is sometimes the only way to solve otherwise intractable problems.

If you don't want to do it, that's fine, but don't jump on my case for suggesting you do what I would do to solve the problem for myself.

I don't doubt this is an issue with Apple's bonjour protocol, but it is clearly a vagrant issue relating to certain specific configurations. If it were a general problem that had a negative impact on large ranges of users it would have floated to the top of Apple's bug-fix list long ago. If you want a solution, you are going to have to determine (as best you can) precisely what configuration is causing your problem: you'll need to do that anyway if you want to file a useful bug with Apple, and you'll need to do that anyway if you want to find a solution on your own, so either way you'll need to do that. And if you want to figure out what configurations cause this problem, you need to poke around with various unix utilities and applications to see if you can see where the conflict is occurring.

My advice to you is to stop being so intelligent; to stop assuming that you know what the problem isn't until you have a more solid idea about what the problem actually is.

OK so after it not happening for a day or so, one of my devices switched names this AM. Looking in the console log I got

at the time it switched.

Would be interesting to see if the rest f you have the same thing. Not sure what this tells up but its the first bit of solid data I've seen on this.

regards

<edit>

the MAC address (00:24:36:9d:9f:7c) in the message

is my Airport Extreme

Anyone else?

mr_bee wrote:

I repeat, random guesses (my interpretation of what you are actually doing) are NOT helpful. Asking folks to "try things" that are potentially invasive and/or destructive based on nothing but hunches is also NOT helpful.

I do appreciate that you believe you are trying to help.

LOL - Well, if you think I 'randomly guessed' that netstat might have some useful information, or that changing the bonjour name of a device might have some horribly deleterious side effect, I don't suppose I can convince you otherwise (even though netstat is a passive utility and you yourself have changed the name of your computer without it exploding). So good luck, and I hope someone shows up with that magic bullet you seem to think is needed to slay this demonic annoyance. 😝

00:24:36:9d:9f:7c is the MAC address of a device on your network; can you determine which device it is? If I'm reading this correctly, some device woke up and tried to claim the local network address 10.0.1.7 (possibly because that was its last assigned address?) and that produced an address conflict because that address had assigned (or reassigned) to something else. If we can discount that 3 second delay, that could be the original source of the name change.