I’ve ended up with a number of machines on my network, and a need to name them all in a somewhat logical way. For several years I had them named after the planets, which worked well until the PCs for myself, my girlfriend, servers and Raspberry Pi’s quickly summed up to more than the eight planets. I’ve broadened it somewhat to include any Greek/Roman mythological figure, but the system is definitely not as clean as it used to be.
Do you have a coordinated naming theme for your machines?
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Every machine is named after what it does (although I do 1337-ify the names, because I’m still a late 90s IRC teen at heart). If you’ve ever been onboarded into a sysadmin role where all the machines are named with whatever whimsical naming scheme each department chose, you’ll fast develop a visceral hatred for non-descriptive naming schemes. The fifth time you get a ticket saying something like ‘Hedwig is down’ and you have to go crawling through three layers of linked files on SharePoint to find what and where ‘Hedwig’ is, you’ll be ready to beat the person who named it to death, and that attitude tends to persist to your home naming scheme :p
The fifth time you get a ticket saying something like ‘Hedwig is down’
If only there was an excellent database to store where Hedwig.bthl4.sea.wa.goliath.corp was and maybe include an alias so you know it’s NNTP5.goliath.corp also.
I shall invent one. It shall replicated and synchronize quickly. It shall interface and accept changes and share data. It will be simple to query so everyone can use it. I shall call it DNS . If people get snippy, I shall next invent an HS record.
Learn to use the tools, man. It’ll help you adhere to a 40-year-old RFC on naming things.
Yes, if you’ve built the network from scratch that works. Retrofitting it into an existing network however is a massive piece of work when you don’t have that single source of truth to start with however. On networks I’ve built sensibly, I’ll happily give people whatever CNAME they want to refer to their machine, but the machines actual name is descriptive, not the other way round.
Rfc1178 be damned.
Try monopoly board street names like oxford road or parklane. Or maybe flower names like daisy or pertunia.
Shrek - OPNSense, because it (firewall) guards my swamp.
Dragon - NAS, because of a dragons hoard.
Donkey - Proxmox, I use this for a few VMs and docker containers. It stores my DNS, donkey was annoying, and there is nothing more annoying than your DNS going down.
Fiona - Backup NAS - less big, only stores important backups.
I asked chatgpt a while ago and it told me this scheme.
A random word starting with V for a virtual machine (and gave me a list of ten words)
Start with L for laptops, add letters for other distinction
Funny, the latest three VMs i setup after that chat had a name starting with V 😂
I use Roman authors, with the machine/VM’s purpose (often vaguely) linked to what the author was known for. For example, my NAS is called Tacitus (a historian), while my game server is called Plautus (a playwright). A couple services predate my schema (like my Pihole and OPNSense box) and are named descriptively.
Fun fact: When AOL was still operating in Germany, internal servers in their network were named after characters / things from Asterix comics, like Asterix, Obelix, Idefix, Miraculix and even Hinkelstein (menhir). When Telecom Italia bought them up they unfortunately got rid of all these and replaced them with standard corpo server names. Source: I worked there.
One of my nicknames is Hugo. I have a Windows, a macOS, a Debian and a Raspbian machine.
So I call them Hugowin, Hugotosh and Hugopi. The Debian machine mostly runs Plex so it is named Plexy. And my Phone is called iBobes because someone once told me that Bobes mean ass in german and i though that is incredibly funny.
FYI: Bobes does not mean ass in german. That’s not even a german word.
Edit: Maybe they meant “Popo” which is closer to butt/behind in english
German here, yes it does and it is. It’s not a high German word, but a dialect one (but it’s present in multiple German dialects, mostly all Franconian ones, as well as Hessian and Swabian). Usually it’s written “Bobbes”, though.
Ungulates. Because who doesn’t like a hoofed animal?
My client machines are even-toed ungulates (order Artiodactyla) and my servers/IoT machines are odd-toed (order Perissodactyla). I’m typing this on Gazelle. My router is called Quagga, both after the extinct zebra subspecies and the routing protocol software (I don’t use it any more but hey, it’s a router).
Biological taxonomy is a great source of a huge number of systematic (and colloquial) names.
I used to work in the GRASP lab at Penn, and my predecessor there was John Bradley of xv fame. He had started naming all the machines after fish.
When I got there I continued the practice, naming some tiny computers being used for mini robots after different types of goldfish.
In my current job, years ago, I managed a group of Linux servers, and I named them after Demons (Lucifer, Asmodeus, Azrael, Beelzebub, etc.).
At this point, there is a specific naming convention in use where I’m at, and the name is limited to identifying organization, application, and server type.
For my clients, we just use company shortcode+role, IE Northern Energy Exchange would be NEE-DC (domain controller) NEE-FS (file server) NEE-APP, NEE-DT-1 (desktop #1), NEE-LT-1 (laptop #1) etc. At home, my network is called Asgard and each device is related to that in some way, all themed appropriately.
Ship names from the expanse.
My PC is the Rocinante My home server was previously the Behemoth, put it in a smaller case so now it’s Medina.
All my homelab stuff is boring. Host machine names are just 'model ’ + ‘-’ + ‘increment’. VMs and containers are either service or service + increment.
Whimsical names and themes are fun, but don’t scale and I need the mental bandwidth for other things than mapping service to machine etc.
Kittybox: old laptop that my cats like sitting on
Thinbox: new laptop that is thiner then kittybox.
Tallbox: desktop
Tinybox: BeagleBone black single board computer acting as server
All of my personal machines are Autobots.
At work we use space probes (Voyager, Pioneer, New Horizons, etc). We’re a small satellite communications company.
I’ve not played for years but I still have a YuGiOh cards naming scheme.
