A computer naming convention just means a set of rules on naming all of your computers since Mac administration
is popular in schools.
We've come up with the following naming convention as we think it would work well in the scenario.
The first value represents a physical location, if you have a score business that operates in multiple
cities, you can identify the city by this value.
The second value represents a building number and a multisite campus.
Third value represents the room number and the fourth the workstation number.
By following this or other naming conventions, you should be able to use the computer name to know
its physical location or use any of the values in the name to assist in the automation of the computers.
Administration and future lessons will show exactly how this can be done.
Mac OS has three computer names that you should know about first, computer name is the friendly name
that appears in sharing with consumer setups.
You will commonly find this name is John's iMac or Jane's iPhone.
The second name, Hostname, is the name that is used in networking out of the box.
This name is not set up.
The third name localhost name is the name used by Apple's sponger service.
When you search for networked devices with a Mac OS or iOS device.
It is this name that appears in the search in regards to active directory.
We need to make sure our Macs have a hostname.
If your organization has PCs already on Active Directory, your Macs can follow the same naming convention
as your PCs.
If all your Macs computer names are set up and you're happy with them, you can just set the hostname
for active directory.
You can also just make all three names.
Match computer names are up to you.
The only requirement is that the hostname is set when joining the domain.
Now that we understand computer names, let's go ahead and take a look at the computer names on this
system and we'll get it ready for joining the domain.
If I go to system preferences and then sharing, you can see that my computer name is Administrator's
Mac.
Now, this happened because when the computer was set up out of the box, the first account that was
created was administrator and therefore the computer name became administrators.
Mac.
Now we can go ahead and change this name in a couple of ways.
Well, we could just type the name in here, but we can also do it from the terminal.
So the commands are pseudo util because you're going to need root permissions and then we're going to
set the computer name.
And then let's go ahead and use our naming convention that we learned about previously.
So this computer is going to be a one oh one one hundred dash one put in the password.
And you see that the computer name changed in sharing.
But we still have administrators, Mac Local as and that's our bond, your name.
So if we want our bond, your name to match, then we can go sudo see you till set local post.
Name one, dash one, one hundred, dash one, and you can see that now the band your name is is set.
Now, let's go ahead and get.
Our hostname.
And you can see it's not set and this is the name that's important for active directory, so let's go
ahead and set it so Sudam as the util and then set hostname.
And then again, we're going to put in the name that we want the computer to do.
And so now the hostname is set.
Now as you can see here, I've got administrators, Mac, though it is spelt wrong and I'll point out
why in a minute, but that this is also the host name.
If I quit the terminal and then relaunch it is going to have the computer name.
Now, before I do that, I want to show you one thing.
If you go to network advance and winds, you can see that the net byas name is here and it's and it
has the same incorrect spelling that's in the terminal.
Now, it said that the hostname wasn't set.
And like I said, if I quit the terminal and I bring it back up, I have the hostname and now this name
doesn't match.
Now, if I go ahead and close all of this out and go back into sharing.
Let's take a look and see what the what the what the name is now it see, it's still the same.
And if I type and change this by typing and I hit OK and I quit and come back, it's not going to change.
You cannot change this from the gooey.
There is actually a list file to change it from, but it's not important.
The one thing that is important to know, as you can see, like I mentioned before, it is spelt wrong.
It's missing a T and an R, but administrators Mac is more than 15 characters and the maximum name for
a net Vieaux name is 15 characters.
So when you set your hostname, you should ideally have a naming convention for your host name.
That is 15 characters and less.
And if you have Windows computers, the same limitation applies.
So using the same naming convention for your Macs and PCs when joining Active Directory makes a lot
of sense and you'll be within the 15 character limit.