Shared name of Mac keeps changing

When I use VPN to connect to the local university from home, naturally my hostname in Terminal is changed to the remote hostname/domain string, and its nameserver values are automatically shoved into /etc/resolv.conf.

For my purposes, I just want to see my local hostname, and as this is simply (for me) a presentation issue, I made some changes in my .bashrc file.

This now restores my hostname in my Terminal prompt, and if I issue the hostname command, it returns the remote hostname/domain string of the VPN session. I can live with this.

My previous post had a syntax error in the PS1 setting. The prompt worked just fine — except as I discovered, a command-line wrap in Terminal would let you type four characters, and then the cursor would jump back to the beginning of the wrap and start overwriting wrap content. Absolutely maddening to track down the cause.

Here is the updated PS1 prompt that does not interfere with line wrap.

VikingOSX wrote:

My previous post had a syntax error in the PS1 setting. The prompt worked just fine — except as I discovered, a command-line wrap in Terminal would let you type four characters, and then the cursor would jump back to the beginning of the wrap and start overwriting wrap content. Absolutely maddening to track down the cause.

Here is the updated PS1 prompt that does not interfere with line wrap.

Instead of finishing with 'White' you may want to use

Normal=$(tput sgr0)

export PS1='\[$Bluebld\]$MyHost: \w\$ \[$Normal]'

Hi Bob,

For those that want the standard white text on the command-line because they have set the Terminal text color preference to white, then the White variable could be replaced in my example with your Normal (sgr0 - remove all attributes).

Perhaps I have gone visually crazy since our vt-52 days (cough), but I now find that bold white is better for my aging eyes on a black or dark slate background.

stevemazich wrote:

Jumping in to reiterate pretty much everything the original poster shared.

I'm a consultant helping 10+ small businesses with all Mac networks and this is maddening. It happens as some of my clients, but not all. Our offices are setup as basic as possible. Usually 15 or less users needing access to a file server for file sharing. We try to roll out a consistent set of hardware with regards to routers and switches. Flat networks, DHCP reservations from the routers. Offices that are setup exactly the same do not behave the same. One client never has names change while another does daily. I saw a computer today with (303) after it. 300 name changes since my last visit 7 days ago...

With the current 10.10.4 version and with most older (non-discoveryd) versions, I've seen this when there have been problems involving the sleep proxy, and when there have been network wiring loops, and when there have been duplicate names of course. Having wired and Wi-Fi lit on a box can cause this, depending on the details of the network configuration.

Can you provide some details of your standard configurations? Are there Wi-Fi differences that might correlate with the working and not-working configurations, such as access point or routed, or Wi-Fi and wired, and the numbers of Wi-Fi access point or Wi-Fi routing devices present?

Have you had any success spelunking around the local mDNS via BonjourBrowser or via dns-sd commands, looking for correlations and for differences between the working and not-working sites?

Cough, you had a VT52! Lucky you. I had an ASR-33 with punched paper tape, and 80 columns punched cards for raised floor glass computer room submits 🙂