UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello,

this is my first post, and yeah, I'm quite new to UNIX, so please bare with me... My question has to do with a few Macs on a Windows network, but since the question is not OS X specific (I think) or Windows specific (I think), but rather UNIXish (I think) I chose to post here rather than in the OS X part of the forum.

On our Windows Server 2003 network we have mostly Windows PC:s, and then a few Macs running on OS X 10.5. A couple of the Macs change names when connected to the network.

Disconnected the Macs will show this when you open a Terminal/bash window:

Adams Mac:~ adam$

and

Bretts Mac:~ brett$

However, if Adams Mac is connected to the network, instead it will show this:

Brett:~ adam$

Bretts Mac when connected to the network, will show this:

PC1:~ brett$ (PC1 being another client (Windows) on the same network).

I have asked our IT consultants about this, but nobody is having a clue to why this occurs, but everyone telling me it's probably perfectly normal.

Can anybody here explain what this is about, or at least point me in the right direction?

Thanks,

fxj

Maybe check how the prompt is built together. Not sure if there is a variable like PS1 for it on Mac.

Explain? no, but help you find what is going on, yes...
>Disconnected the Macs will show this when you open a Terminal/bash window:
>Adams Mac:~ adam$

What you are talking about here is the prompt no?
In unix this prompt is a variable called PS1
if you type:

Code:

echo $PS1

it should display what it is being asked to display as prompt
e.g.
ant:$PWD \$
In this case ant is an affected variable already substituted: HOSTNAME (will not change...)
while $PWD will constantly change...
how thid is done?

Code:

export PS1=`uname -n`':$PWD \$ '

So you will have to find where PS1 is set, could be in .profile, or in /etc/profile or...
start searching ... good luck!

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Yes, the PS1 is part of OS X as well. If I do a echo $PS1 on one of the Macs, I get:

\h:\W \u\$

According to an Apple manual page, this should - in short - be read out as:

host\ basename of current wd ("~" if the home directory) \ user name of current user \ effective UID

(See Mac OS X Manual Page For bash(1) under "Prompting"...)

If I apply this to what I have seen so far (see my initial post), it tells me that everytime I log one of the Macs onto the network, another client machine becomes the host of that Mac.

So, is this interpretation correct? And how could this happen? Since nobody has (or should have at least) made such settings to the machines, i e nobody has (or should have) set these Macs to become automatically "hosted" by other clients on the network upon logging on...

Also, as a sidenote, we have four Macs on the network; this phenomenon only occurs on two of them, the prompts of the other two remain unaffected whether logged on to the network or not.