There may be some Mac admins who don’t really care that much about computer names. After all, especially if the computer isn’t joined to the domain (many of our machines are not), what does it matter? It’s the name that will show up in Sharing or in the Terminal.app few users use. If you do care, though, I created a Munki nopkg that looks at one of three places for a name to rename the computer name to—display_name, user, or notes.

I based this on the three custom fields that MunkiAdmin has editable for manifests.

To use it, just modify the display name, user, or notes field in the manifest you want to rename, tweak in the nopkg (via commenting/uncommenting) the installcheck_script and postinstall_script to use the field you want, and then add this nopkg as a managed_installs item to the manifest(s) you want to manage computer names for. This nopkg will change the LocalHostName, HostName, and ComputerName.

As written, this nopkg will automatically ignore AD-bound computers.

P.S. If you have a database or spreadsheet of some kind of what the computer names should be, you can also bulk-fill-in those fields. I have a simple (no subdirs on my manifests) sample script you can tweak.