How do you change the computer name in the BES Console?
I installed the BigFix agent on a brand new Mac laptop. I did some updates to the Mac laptop and changed it’s hostname. The change doesn’t get reflected on the BES Console, although it is checking in and reporting back other changes. In fact, in the summary it shows that the hostname has been changed. When I remove the laptop from the BES Console, it automatically shows up again with the old computer name.
There some complications with hostname / computername behavior on the Mac.
What do you mean by “changed the hostname”? Did you change the computer name in the Sharing Prefs? If you change the name under the sharing tab you should see the change reflected in the console. If you change the name on the command line, you likely will not see this in the console (see the notes below).
Is the machine on a Windows domain controller DNS server? Sometimes in this environment Macs don’t play well (or the DNS doesn’t play well) and it ignores the Sharing name. When you type “hostname” in Terminal you’ll get whatever machine name DNS thinks it last gave to that address. The way around it is to get a static IP and have the DNS server assign a name to that IP that matches what is in Sharing. (Yuck).
There is also a further difference between hostname and computer name. Hostname is typically derived from the Sharing name (if not overridden by the DNS stuff or changed on the command line), but has a restricted set of characters. If all the characters in the computer name don’t map to the legal hostname character set the values may be different.
The name we show in the console corresponds to the ‘computer name’ inspector. You can use the “hostname” inspector to get the version with the restricted character set, assigned on the command line, or the DNS assigned version. However, this is not a default property.
Regards,
Jesse
(also, thanks to our Mac developer David Litwin for help clarifying the situation)
I changed the hostname of the Mac using the command-line (not the sharing name). I will try the method that Stacy Lee suggests in the link, and I’m sure that that is the answer. Thank you!!