[Drahnier]

When I open up (wake up) my MacBook Pro, I usually find this alert message:

"The name of your computer, MacBook Pro, is already in use on this network. The name has been changed to MacBook Pro (2)."

This creates two problems that I have discovered so far.

First: My Apple TV no longer recognizes my iTunes Library the MBP. We could be watching a TV show
or movie and will stop because the MBP name was changed by something in my system. I then have to go
to the MBP and change the name back in the sharing section of System Preferences to get Apple TV going again.

Second: My wireless HP printer can't find my MBP under its new name, most of the time.

I spoke with some people at AppleCare but never did get to anyone who was familiar with the problem.

Any suggestions as to the cause and cure? Thanks for your help!

[bastion]

 Drahnier, on 23 January 2013 - 11:31 AM, said:

When I open up (wake up) my MacBook Pro, I usually find this alert message:

"The name of your computer, MacBook Pro, is already in use on this network. The name has been changed to MacBook Pro (2)."

This creates two problems that I have discovered so far.

First: My Apple TV no longer recognizes my iTunes Library the MBP. We could be watching a TV show
or movie and will stop because the MBP name was changed by something in my system. I then have to go
to the MBP and change the name back in the sharing section of System Preferences to get Apple TV going again.

Second: My wireless HP printer can't find my MBP under its new name, most of the time.

I spoke with some people at AppleCare but never did get to anyone who was familiar with the problem.

Any suggestions as to the cause and cure? Thanks for your help!

If you've got your machine configured to wake on LAN access and have an AirPort base station, the base station will pretend to be your machine while it's asleep to intercept and redirect service requests. Sometimes it seems like the base station doesn't give up the name fast enough and your machine is polite enough to not step on the other device with the name it wants to use. You can turn off the wake-on-access pref if you don't need this.

I think I've also seen this kind of thing happen when you've got two network interfaces active at the same time. Say Ethernet and Wifi both enabled and connected.