Mac bind to windows domain with wrong name I'm fairly new to the world of Mac. I've had the administering of around 100 macs thrust upon me (previous guy left, little documentation. Only things like the images he used, no documentation of whats in them Merry Christmas to me! :( ) As far as I can tell, they had no Administration system in place. The solution was basically get everything the way you want it on the master, disable updates and things, clone to other machines. Repeat every several months/ year or so (based on image dates)

Anyway, my manager wants me doing things differently. I'm working on integrating the Macs into our AD somewhat. When I bind them to our AD with a name like M109831-TED117 it  shows up in AD as m109831_ted117. While the capitalization isn't an issue, the underscore is very inconvenient. 

We are on a Win 2008 DNS server. this is Binding Mac clients ranging from 10.5-10.7 and I tried both Directory Utility (like here http://blog.pluralsight.com/join-mac-to-windows-domain) and through the comparable dsconfigad commands

tl;dr 

When binding to AD why does my dash become an underscore?
Put in name M109831-TED117 when binding and it shows in AD as m109831_ted117. can this be changed?
I thought it could be a machine based GPO that was applied to either the Mac clients or the DNS server.

However, I did a little digging and found this:
http://www.bu.edu/tech/files/2009/10/AD-OD-10.6-1.pdf

Look on page 6.  It specifically mentions about OpenDirectory and how it renames dashes to underscores. It looks like the change is coming from the Mac end of things. Why?    I found this regarding OpenLDAP which is what Open Directory is based on:
OpenLDAP Hyphens within attribute names considered as separate tokens

It appears to be a software bug.