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FYI - Preferences/ByHost
Authored by: a1291762 on Apr 25, '02 06:24:20PM

The ByHost folder contains host-specific preferences. Since you can share an OS X profile among many computers, there are things that are only going to be on some machines (such as screensavers installed in /Library).

OS X originally used the hostname as part of the preferences file name (meaning that changing your hostname "killed" your preferences) but Apple fixed that somewhere (10.1 maybe?) so it now has some kind of serial number.



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FYI - Preferences/ByHost
Authored by: johnsawyercjs on Feb 07, '08 02:40:19AM

That "serial number" is the address of the Mac's primary Ethernet port (en0), known as the Ethernet ID or MAC (Media Access Control) address, which is a number unique to each Mac. It's also visible at System Preferences -> Network -> Ethernet.



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