Mac OS X clients getting wrong DNS names

Hi, so we've had macs here for a long time. We eventually got them working with the Active Directory, and with this I thought would also come the DNS or DDNS names i.e. mymac.instituation.ac.uk (for local network stuff). I must iterate here that this is just for internal name lookups, nothing external here, no internet related stuff, intranet ONLY.

So, it worked on most of them. After adding them to active directory, they got their names: 'mymac1.institution.ac.uk', but for about 1 in 5 macs (we have about 150) it'll give it the DNS name of some random machine in college! So instead of it saying 'mymac.institution.ac.uk' it'll say 'somonesPC.institution.ac.uk' !!!!!

I've put up with it for about 7 years, just used the mac sharing name instead, and remembering IP addresses. But we're trying to integrate the macs further into the network, and this is perhaps one of the last hurdles.

Anyway, I did some searching and found this quite frustrating forum. Seems lots of people not communicating very well. At the end, someone suggested this solution. I've yet to try it but if anyone has any comments?


So, I've now found a command which changes: Computer Name, Host Name, Local Host Name:
scutil --get ComputerName
scutil --get HostName
scutil --get LocalHostName

The Computer Name and Local Host Name is the one set up through System Preferences > Sharing, at the top


scutil --get ComputerName|scutil --set HostName

HP Designjet 130 IP Address

One of the most annoying things I have to deal with is printers' IP addresses. This is especially difficult if the printer doesn't have a screen. Take the HP Designjet 130. It actually has a screen, but cannot represent digits. Not only this, but on top of this, it only has 3 buttons, none of which mention "setup". So, when the computer cannot send jobs to the printer how do you find out what is wrong? Well:

1. load up a browser window and browse to the last known IP address of the printer...
1. no response.
2. ping the IP address which you think it has......
1. no response.
3. hold in the power button (while it's switched on) and press the paper feed button 4 times!!!!!!!
1. it should print some (not sure how many) pages of information. 1st one has IP address.

I do remember wanting to write this down about 7 months ago but I can't find it anywhere. Anyway, here it is.

P.S. 

HP, could you please make the instruction number 3 in the list above more self-explanatory. i.e. have a button or just hold in the power button for setup printouts. 4 button presses is over the top.

Firefox not picking up the wpad auto config file

I've decided to setup firefox on the new Windows image but it turns out it doesn't like the options:

• Use system proxy settings
• this is the one I prefer as I can set it using group policy/workgroup manager
• Auto-detect proxy settings for this network

Whenever either of these are ticked you cannot browse the internet.

Had a quick search and think I've found the problem. The browser looks for the file:

http://wpad/wpad.dat

Now when I typed this in the address bar of; Safari, Internet Explorer and Google Chrome; they all downloaded the wpad.dat file. But Firefox was the odd one out as it just displayed the "Unable to connect" and "Problem loading page" errors.

Did a quick search and found this Knowledge Base Article describing how all other browser now use DHCP to help find this address, but Firefox only uses DNS. Also found it here in a blog and more importantly in Mozillas bug reports here (takes a while to load).

The fix apparently is to put a "DNS record for the WPAD server" (described here under 7.2.2)

Deploy Studio set up and DHCP problems

I've been using Deploy Studio server for at least 1 year, perhaps 2, and it's fantastic. It's streamlined imaging perfectly, with workflows helping with different setups.

But all good things have their drawbacks, and upon upgrading Deploy Studio server from RC14 to RC20 everything appeared good, until two days later the Network Administrator rings me up and asks if he can unplug the Xserver, doh! It appeared to be the cause of much dismay for those two days, constantly giving all computers wrong DHCP information, for which is was not even meant to be giving!

We looked into it and the Xserver was responding to DHCP requests and giving "no-dns-server.example.com" as the dns server, overriding what the computers normally had set, which caused much much confusion. It was of course quite amazing that the network administrator managed to track it down to this problem, but I do suppose it took two days.

Upon closer examination, we noticed the DHCP service was "apparently" not running, but when we switched the "Netboot' service off it no longer responded to DHCP requests. So it was the Netboot service which was using part of the DHCP service, which Alan was sure was not 'usual'. Of course we were not sure what it did before the trouble started, whether or not it responded before of not, and whether it was just the fact it was dishing out the wrong DHCP information (IP Stack someone later told me) rather then no information.

We looked at the stopped DHCP service settings and saw one entry, which did have "no-dns-server.example.com" in it's properties. We deleted this entry, which was the only entry, but we still received responses. We measured these responses and it was now giving out the right information, which was better, but we would have preferred it not to give any information.

So to conclude, I whittled it down to the update from Deploy Studio RC14 to RC20, where Deploy Studio had changed, and perhaps added the "no-dns-server.example.com" entry the way Netboot used the  DHCP service.