I am on MacOS 15.1, and want to change the name my MacBook broadcasts to the network. My MacBooks name is MyNames-Macbook-`pro in Settings > General > About > Name and the same in General > Sharing > Local hostname with the additional .local. I want this (or something similar) to be the network name, i.e. if I try to arp -a from another device I get mac (I-address) …, more importantly, the file sharing name under smb://mac. Both of these are listed as “mac” and doesn’t seems to change when I change the name anywhere. At one point it changed to my ip address when I restarted the router, but it returned to “mac” on a system reboot.
I saw someone suggest to change the wifi WINS NetBIOS name, which was “MAC”, so I changed this to the same name as my computer name which did not solve my issue. Additionally someone suggested changing the name in About, and waiting for a DNS refresh, can this be forced on my router, or just via a router restart?
I was able to achieve this result on my old MacBook by changing the name, and while it didn’t change immediately but after a few days, the original name was the same name as the device name. So hopefully it will work itself out and I can just close this off for the next person looking, but in the meantime does anyone know a better fix for this.
