does your mac os hostname look weird?

If you use terminal a lot, like I tend to – even for directory lookups for phone numbers of colleagues, and if you’re as anal retentive as I am, then perhaps the way your hostname appears in your command prompt may be important to you   OS X seems to, by default, set your hostname to whatever reverse dns resolves to – if reverse dns is available – so if you run the hostname command from the terminal and see something other than the cute name you gave your mac, then it’s resolving the reverse dns of your ip.

Here’s how you can change that.  From the terminal enter the following command: sudo scutil –set HostName myHostname – or myhostname.domain.com.  For a little more information on this, check out my source: http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~bhardie/misc/misc/scutil.html

You can also further customize the look of your command prompt by setting and editing a .bashrc file.  See this article http://osxdaily.com/2006/12/11/how-to-customize-your-terminal-prompt/