How to protect a computer name from being disclosed to network peers?

Question

I'd prefer my hostname to be hidden (or a fake hostname to be shown - both variants are interesting actually) from my network peers (including routers ad DHCP servers).

I believe my IP and MAC addresses are enough for them to know. How to achieve this in Ubuntu?

In practice I've seen SOHO wireless routers to detect client's (clientside-set) hostnames showing them on their DHCP lease tables. Not sure if this works with Ubuntu, but with Windows I'm pretty sure. I'd like to avoid this in all the OSes I use, Ubuntu being the main of them.

Answer 1

That's probably the most excentric question I've read on AskUbuntu so far. You can connect to a computer on your network by using hostname.local instead of using the IP address. I don't understand why anyone would want to hide that. You can easily change it, though, if you don't like the default of using the username in the hostname. That is understandable.

Just edit /etc/hostname to the hostname you like and then edit /etc/hosts to reflect that change. You need to reboot afterwards.

Answer 2

The only reason to have an host name, is, to use it from the net. On the host itself, you rarely need the hostname.

If you want the others to use a different hostname, choose a different hostname.

While the idea of a soul as a stealable thing is nonsense, the idea to be dependent on knowing the name is super nonsense. And a computer having a soul is meganonsense; believe me!