How the teminal shell HostName can be as “229:~ lancee$”?

Question

It prints :

"Last login: Tue Mar  1 17:19:48 on ttys000 ly-lanceedemacbook:~ lancee$ "

when I login terminal on my Macbook with networking.

But sometime go like this :

"229:~ lancee$"

random numbers, Is there any hackTools working within the local area network? or means what?

Answer 1

Could it be that one of the networks you visit hands out hostnames that "reflect" your IP? I´ve seen this in practice before, where the hostname auto-assigned to your machine essentially is eg. 154.local (or 154.example.com) given a DHCP-provided IP of 192.0.32.154 . Since you obviously use \h and not \H in your PS1 you would then only seem to have a random number as a hostname. Network Admins tend to do that to shorten the amount of repetitive numbers they have to type (and various other reasons).