OSX host name problem?

element05

Hi,

I have a new iBook G4 (about a month old). Everything is peachy, and I love it to bits, but there's something a bit funny about its hostname.

The computer name (as set in system preferences) looks normal (it's still on the default <firstname>-<surname>s-ibook-g4 that the OSX initial setup set it to). However, the actual *hostname* of the laptop seems to be messed up - as in, if I turn on the built in web server and go to 127.0.0.1, the address comes up as http://unknown00045c6182f3.bearcave/ (bearcave is my workgroup name).

I have a wireless network, and my wireless router is also picking up the weird name as the hostname of the iBook. I had a look in /etc/hosts, but everything in there looks normal.

Anyone know why this might be? It doesn't seem to be breaking anything, but I just can't work it out.


Cheers,

John

Hugh_C

element05 wrote:

Hi,

...if I turn on the built in web server and go to 127.0.0.1, the address comes up as http://unknown00045c6182f3.bearcave/ (bearcave is my workgroup name).

Hi John, what's a workgroup and how do you administer it?

My /etc/hosts looks like:

# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost

but I seem to remember that on another machine (not here in work) that I was hosting a domain on, I had to edit the hosts file to include that domain in the loopback. I'm sure there are hints about this in
http://www.macosxhints.com

element05

Sorry, I must have been smoking crack, I meant domain name, not workgroup (I come from a Windows environment, this is my first Mac ).

My hosts file looks exactly like yours. However, I have noticed that the hex number after the word "unknown" is the mac address of the built in AirPort card. I did a full text search of the entire hard drive (using the text search built into TextWrangler), and the only reference I could find to the full string was a few lines in a file called asl.log (I don't know where this file is, Finder doesn't find it) which go like:

[Time 2005.11.09 20:02:48 UTC] [Facility daemon] [Sender configd] [PID 31] [Message setting hostname to "unknown0014517a55ca.bearcave"] [Level 5] [UID -2] [GID -2] [Host john-mellericks-ibook-g4]
[Time 2005.11.09 22:10:25 UTC] [Facility daemon] [Sender configd] [PID 63] [Message setting hostname to "unknown0014517a55ca.bearcave"] [Level 5] [UID -2] [GID -2] [Host john-mellericks-ibook-g4]

(The hex value here is the real one - the one in my first post was just made up, as I didn't have the actual value to hand)

Any thoughts?

element05

I did three things to my setup here; I changed the computer name to iBear, I ran MacJanitor (http://personalpages.tds.net/~brian_hill/macjanitor.html), and I changed the domain name of my wireless network to "homenet" (previously, the domain name and the SSID of the network had been the same - and I had also had a different wireless network set up at one point, using different hardware, but with the same SSID - don't know if that's important, but I'll just mention it), and after a reboot, the hostname was showing up properly (ibear.homenet).

So I have no idea what was causing it, or what the specific fix was, but that worked for me