Duplicated Mac device name due to DHCP issue from OS X

[#1]

Summary

Customer who is using Inventory manager to get Macintosh device inventory, sometimes the device name will be over write, rather than the system name, it returns a strange name followed by IP address formatting. e.g. "d-i184-53-65". This name seems to relate to the IP address in many cases.

Synopsis

Customer who is using Inventory manager to get Macintosh device inventory, sometimes the device name will be over write, rather than the system name, it returns a strange name followed by IP address formatting. e.g. "d-i184-53-65". This name seems to relate to the IP address in many cases.

For example:

"d-i184-53-65" has ip address 10.184.53.65
"d-i184-12-213" has ip address 10.184.12.213
"d-s57-107" has ip address 172.23.57.107
"d-p55-108" has ip address 192.168.55.108

Therefore our current product behaviour will be Mac inventory whose name appears (dns name + old IP) will be kept discarded as duplicated, only the latest one with current IP will be shown as valid inventory.

A screenshot of this symptom is attached in this article

Discussion

This is not a product defect however our product inventory tool uses the hostname of Unix and Mac OS X managed devices as the machine name. By default, Mac OS X automatically determines a hostname through a list of possibilities and goes with the first valid name found:

- The name provided by the DHCP or BootP server for the primary IP address
- The first name returned by a reverse DNS (address-to-name) query for the primary IP address
- The local hostname (set in System Preferences/Sharing pane)
- The name "localhost"

When using DHCP without assigning static IP addresses to Mac OS X machines, the hostname can therefore change depending on the currently assigned IP address. So this case is affected by #2.

This is an known issue on Mac OS X end.

We suggest customer network admin configure properly to avoid the DHCP overwrite mac host name so that our inventory tool can get a consistent computer name. Otherwise It will affect all the physical Mac machine using OS X.

Workaround

We suggest customer network admin configure properly to avoid the DHCP overwrite mac host name so that our inventory tool can get a consistent computer name. Otherwise It will affect all the physical Mac machine using OS X.

There are plenty article on the internet regarding how to stop Mac OS X override machine host name when DHCP is used.