Recently, a friend of mine received his first Macintosh in the form of a spiffy brand-new iMac. He has a background in using Linux and Windows to do development, and was excited to try using a Mac as his everyday development machine. After zipping through the initial setup screens, he decided to open up the Terminal app to set up his SSH keys. However, he noticed something odd at the command prompt.
That's...unexpected.
'lickmysackbiotch'? That's not an expected hostname. (Note: personal info removed from the screenshots.). My friend thought that this was some sort of prank, but I assured him that was not the case. Checking other areas of his system confirmed the 'lickmysackbiotch' hostname along with some other weirdness.
What in the world is going on?
At this point, we were concerned that there may be some funny business going on. We checked my Mac, but everything looked fine. Mind you, his iMac was fresh out of the box so we had no clue what could possibly be causing the problem. We called over the IT guy to get his opinion. After a few minutes of checking for a solution, the IT guy decided to call Apple Support.
I can only imagine what was going through the Apple support representative's mind when the IT guy told her that we had an iMac that said 'lickmysackbiotch' on the screen. As it was, she was clearly embarrassed to say the precise words and kept referring to 'that phrase' during the support call.
The Apple support representative couldn't figure out how to resolve the issue, and decided that we should bring in the iMac for a replacement. My friend ended up doing so, and brought the replacement iMac to the office. Unfortunately, when he configured the new iMac, he got another bogus hostname!
Thankfully, this hostname made a bit more sense and was something that we could identify as being the name of a known device. When my friend rebooted his iMac, he got yet another weird hostname. This time, it turned out to be the name of one of our coworker's devices. There was some sort of DHCP weirdness going on that caused the erroneous hostname, which apparently isn't unheard of in the Mac world. The mystery had been resolved!
Sometimes the weirdest things happen with our favorite tech tools, folks.