MacBook Pro identifying itself strangely in Terminal and Apache

Question

In Terminal my bash prompt is

unknown-00-26-bb-16-08-a0:~ simon$

When I switch Web Sharing on, I am presented with the following URL as the location of the site served from my machine:

http://unknown-00-26-bb-16-08-a0.home/~simon/

Can anyone help me identify why this is happening?

I am running OS X 10.6 on a MacBook Pro.

Many thanks

Answer 1

You can change/check your local hostname by going to System Preferences and opening the Sharing Preference Pane. Mac OS X uses the local hostname over the host name. (echo $HOSTNAME will show the local hostname)

You'll want to click the Edit... button near the top of the window under where it says your Computer Name. You can then set your local hostname. The other method is via the command line:

sudo scutil --set LocalHostName simon