Fixing “Client ‘foo’ can only be used from host ‘bar.local’ problem on Mac

Quick problem fix; there are some strange problems with P4V on Mac OS X which causes a spurious change to the host name in client specifications; everything works fine until one day you fire up P4v and get the error “Client ‘foo’ can only be used from host ‘bar.local”….I’ve found a couple of references to this on various fora but nothing that seems to solve it directly. NOTE: I run P4 locally on my machine and only use it for my own (local) revision control. As I mention below I doubt if this problem occurs if you’re running P4 on a proper networked server….

Anyway, I have a fix that works for me and it’s simple; run p4 to edit your client spec (‘foo’ in my example) and remove the line containing ‘Host‘…That line restricts access to a given host and is the one that seems to get “creatively altered” somehow to add a “.local” extension to it. Remove this restriction and all works.

HOWEVER: this fix assumes you don’t need host restriction which you might, of course. I suspect it might not be a problem for you anyway then since you’ll be using something like a properly resolved IP or network name…so there.