I just spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out how to set the domain name in Mac OS X. As it turns out, the answer is “it depends”. If you are running a version of OSX prior to 10.5, then look in “/etc/hostconfig” for the “HOSTNAME=” parameter and set it to be the FQDN (Fully Qualified Domain Name) that you want to use. So, for host “foo” located in the domain “bar.com”, the entry would be as follows:
HOSTNAME=foo.bar.com
For OSX 10.5, “/etc/hostconfig” is being deprecated. If you look in “/etc/hostconfig” on 10.5, you’ll see that “HOSTNAME” is no longer listed. There are a couple of preferred methods to do this in 10.5:
sudo hostname -s foo.bar.com
or
sudo scutil –set HostName foo.bar.com
You can verify the change by issuing the “hostname” command without any arguments. The output from the command will display the FQDN of your computer. The command “hostname -s” will display only the host name of your computer (minus the domain name).
Don’t let any of this confuse you with the Computer Name setting in “System Preferences–>Sharing” which really should be called “Bonjour Name”.
Confused yet?
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