02-13-2011, 03:14 PM

I don't know why, but my 10.6 system keeps displaying the wrong hostname in System Preferences > Sharing. Whenever I enable file sharing or web sharing, it tells me that other users can connect to my system by visiting afp://rogergreenlaw or http://rogergreenlaw. That's odd because the hostname for my system is euclid! If I ssh to another system on my network (for example, my Ubuntu system) the terminal will show that the last login was from rogergreenlaw. ARGGG!!!!

I think rogergreenlaw was the hostname of my neighbor's computer...he brought it over for me to fix some things not too long ago and now for some reason my system seems to be displaying that hostname. Things get even more bizarre as his system is Windows 7.

I have checked and the text field at the top of the System Preferences > Sharing screen says "euclid". I also just recently ran "sudo scutil --set HostName euclid" and rebooted but it still shows rogergreelaw in the individual sharing panels.

How on earth can I get this machine to have the correct hostname? Right now I am running a recursive grep on / to see if I can find the bogus hostname (sudo grep -rn "rogergreenlaw" /). Any other ideas?

02-14-2011, 07:58 PM

I think this is related to DHCP addressing believe it or not.

For HaHas, change your DHCP scope to something different and reboot the Mac.

If your scope is 192.168.1.50-100, change it to 192.168.101-150

You may want to power cycle the router too (or refresh DHCP services and cache if it's a server service).