Local Machine Name Changed.

Hi,

I think I may have posted this in the wrong forum originally so I'm re posting here, sorry!!

I woke up this morning to a message on my iMac saying that my local machine name had been changed as my current one was already being used on the network. Does anyone know what might have caused this and should I be concerned about it?

Thanks!

This actually happened to me too. My thought was that it must have been some cached DNS record and that is what caused it. It happened to both my iMac and Macbook. It appended their names with "-2". I simply renamed them and it hasn't happened since.

My home network is 10.111.10.x and the router defaults to 192.168.1.x. I also use OS X server as DNS. My guess is when I replaced the router last time and all the addresses except the server changed during reconfiguration of the router I now had mismatched DNS records for the rest of the network.

do you have more computers in the house? you might have accidently set the same hostnames for 2 computers

to change them go to Sharing Preferences and you can change the name (it's at the very top)

Edit:
or type "hostname -s name_you_like" in Terminal

Hi guys,

Thanks for the help. Nope, I don't have two machines running as such. I have my iMac set up to a router and I also have an Apple TV but I definately haven't changed it by accident.

MacsWork, that's what happened (although I haven't changed my router), it appended my current machine name with -2 for some reason. I'll change it back tonight and see what happens. I just wanted to make sure nothing sinister was going on!!