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Choosing names for your computers
- 8plot 17y agoI like naming systems after ex-coworkers, and especially ex-managers.
- philwelch 17y agoClassic. I have a naming scheme for my personal laptops--female characters from sci fi series. I've had an aluminum PowerBook named Kira, a black MacBook named Dee, and an aluminum MacBook named Kara so far.
- waterlesscloud 17y agoMy current naming theme is Song Of Ice And Fire characters. The netbook I'm writing this in is named Tyrion, for example.
- nreece 17y agoA nice naming scheme (for server names) I read about somewhere suggested following the periodic table. Element names can be used as the server names and corresponding element numbers as corresponding IP addresses (subnet suffix) of the servers.
- sketerpot 17y agoThat's as good an excuse as any to post the Periodic Table on the wall.
- AngryParsley 17y agoThere are other advantages to this naming scheme. Element abbreviations can be used as short DNS names. For example, both lithium and li could resolve to 192.168.1.3. Also, groups of elements can correspond to types of computers. Halogens can be embedded devices, noble gasses can be gaming machines, alkali metals can be file servers, etc.
- mojuba 17y agoI'd use radioactive elements for Windows servers. Also, hydrogen - firewall/GW, oxygen - mail server, carbon - public web server, iron - source repository.
- thestoicattack 17y agoAll my computers are named after Star Wars planets. The recently acquired MacBook Air is "naboo".
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- thwarted 17y agoI kept running out of names with various schemes, but right now all my machine names are words that end in x.
- ghshephard 17y agoI name our servers after the asset tag numbers. DNS can then be used to provide an inventory of our data centers. It also ensures we have a programatic and automatic way to name machines, and numbers are remarkably memorable after a while.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- js2 17y agoAny scheme based on a pool of names does not scale. If you have big plans, a sequence is the way to go.
- soult 17y agoThere are lots of pools you could use that offer a vast amount of names, assuring that you never run out even if you have a very large number of hosts. Good examples in my opinion are names of things existing in real life, e.g. band names, names of famous (CS) people, ..., while fictional names (characters from some book) tend to run out too soon. You could even partition hostnames, e.g. all workstations in room 1 are named after famous rock stars, all workstation in room 2 are named after famouse rappers, etc.
- bmelton 17y agoI get that there isn't a serious argument here, but how do you reconcile when the guy using 'megadeth' moves to a different cubicle?
- petercooper 17y agoA big(ish) hosting company I once worked for used Caribbean islands. This rapidly turned out to be a mistake and it quickly turned into any islands, then cities, then god knows what :-) My current scheme is using major LA thoroughfares (Pico, Victory, Ventura, etc) but as I'm unlikely to scale beyond two digits, I'm not worried ;-)
- s-phi-nl 17y agoDid you did consult the following list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_in_the_Caribbean http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_in_the_Caribbea...?
- petercooper 17y agoVery cool! I suspect they did not exhaust that list :-) Though "Barrel of Beef" doesn't seem like server name material to me.
- iamdave 17y agoI've got a pretty simple naming convention: interstates.
- harpastum 17y agoPrevious article and lively conversation on this subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834817 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834817
- wfarr 17y agoWe use names of beers and liquors. Works well enough.
- lief79 17y agoOnly time I remember having interesting computer names out side of college, the companies lawyers put a squash to it. Infectious diseases just has so much creativity to it. I suspect they were ok with "cholera", but someone in the legal department got upset with "ebola". I think the rest had been disabled by that point, and I'm sure they were already off the internal dns.
- spudlyo 17y agoDon't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names. Oops. My work computer is Spaz, my iPhone is Dirty Sanchez and my laptop is Dingleberry.
- carbocation 17y agoFittingly, we name our servers after universities. Ivy League colleges are web-facing, the Pac-10 are database servers, and the Claremont colleges are dev boxes. Ultimately no scheme will hold up, but at least we have a few thousand pre-made names to use.
- soult 17y agoWhile looking at the serverfault thread linked somewhere in this post, I found the following site: http://www.namingschemes.com/ http://www.namingschemes.com/ It's a whole wiki full of naming schemes. It actually included the one I am using (Battlestar Galactica callsigns), which I though should have been pretty unique.
- froo 17y agoBSG callsigns, cool - I've been naming my machines after 80's transformers for years!
- sunkencity 17y agoi have two machines on a similar theme the first is called battlestar. and the other is galactica. my backup box is called medic.
- tvon 17y agoMy first naming scheme revolved around monkeys, I had spacemonkey, funkymonkey and.. I forget the third. That one didn't scale well. For a short while I used characters from children's books (mom is a librarian who loves children's books), this included lafcadio, lorax and grinch. Right now it's robots from Futurama. Bender, flexo (the Win XP dual-boot of bender, which is OSX), clamps, roberto (the crazy, stabbing robot), calculon and my dedicated server, robot-devil. Not that anyone asked, but hey, naming schemes are fun!
- cgranade 17y agoFor my personal systems, I choose names of demons (since they run lots of dæmons). I get a little thrill out of not knowing what to name something, and taking it as an excuse to go look up cool names.
- nrr 17y agoI use names from various books, in no particular fashion. Most of my names are from Tad Williams books, but I've been known to use the names of Anne McCaffrey's dragons as well, with some names from Norse mythology tossed in for good measure. My current workstation is pfefirrit. In the past, I've had fizz, click, karthwine, ninebirds, nuzzledark, nipslither, bast-imret, earnotch, and knet-makri as servers. My old workstations were cloudleaper, bite-then-bark, pop, hushpad, and tailchaser. My firewall was meerclar. As far as laptops go, I've used munin, hugin, odin, krelli, skoggi, krauka, nrefa-o, mnanth, and caylith. Back when I did IT for a couple of schools, I used chemical compounds in a certain fashion to reflect room numbers.
- RodgerTheGreat 17y agoI go with colors. My main machines are Indigo and Violet, and I have a server under my bed called Aubergine.
- jballanc 17y agoMy portable is always DeepThought, my desktop/workhorse machine is always Earth, and my backup volume/server is always Magrathea
- 100k 17y agoProbably not very original, but I use titles of SF books I like that also reflect on the machine (sometimes). Here's some I've used: - tau-zero - subtleknife - Dark Light (iPhone) - Omega Device (iPod Nano - I like this one :) - skyroad - zodiac
- decavolt 17y agoThundercats. I name all of my machines after the Thundercats.
- thewileyone 17y agoCoruscant, Hoth, Yavin, Dagobah, Tatooine, Dantooine, and of course, Deathstar
- watmough 17y agoMine are named after Star Trek characters. Troi (MacBook), Picard (iMac), Locutus (Mini), Crusher (MBP). At uni, most of the computers were named after distilleries. i.e. Livet, Morangie, Grant, Islay etc.
- joezydeco 17y agoI heard of one organization that used disasters. Titanic, Hindenburg, Ishtar... the nice part is that you keep getting new ones all the time. I'd probably avoid Eyjafjallajokull, though.
- groaner 17y agoFinally, a use for Google Sets: http://labs.google.com/sets http://labs.google.com/sets
- ax0n 17y agoI've never seen that before. When I was in college, I named all my machines after songs by Orbital. This worked pretty well since they were, back then, cranking out a new album every couple of years or so. I added chime, midnight, and halcyon to Google Sets to see what it would come up with and every other suggestion on its list was the name of an Orbital song. Nice.
- Osmose 17y agoMy boss is the sysadmin for my school's CS department; there is an IT department that every other department uses, but they're slow and useless. For the longest time, their servers were named after ships, such as Bismark, Arizona, Enterprise, etc, while all of our servers were named after things that sink ships, such as Broadside, Salvo, Crash, Leak, etc.
- bmelton 17y agoI've always had (what I would guess are) odd schemes. My first naming scheme was based around beat poets (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs), but currently, my scheme is 'cool Jacks that I like', which includes Bristow, McCoy, Kerouac, Kevorkian, Kirby, etc. BSG callsigns sound awesome, and somebody else mentioned colors, but I think scaling that gets confusing, especially if you're color blind, as I am.
- donw 17y agoDoctor Who characters for my home systems here; my black MacBook is called Tardis, because it's bigger on the inside, and the Dell server was obviously styled by Davos, so it's called Dalek. Naming schemes help keep the fun in managing computers.
- d0m 17y agoDisney chose to name their computers like some planets; while the NASA chose to name their computers like some Disney characters :p
- Supermighty 17y agoI used to name my computers after Cathedrals but there weren't enough that sounded neat. So I switched to names of English cities.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- thought_alarm 17y agoMy computers and devices are named after popular females of the 1920s: - myrtle - mindy - mabel - ilene - irma - iris - patsy - floy - agnes - nellie Nellie, of course, is my beautiful NeXT cube.
- KC8ZKF 17y agoBond women. Kissy, Pussy, Solitaire, Domino, Vesper, Honey, Goodnight...
- kordless 17y agoIn the 90s, fruits. Coconut, kiwi, orange. Had a Cisco named passion. When you'd ping it from the Solaris box (pineapple) it would say "passion is alive". Around 2000 with Grub I did bugs. Ant, roach, mosquito, brainbug (from starship troopers). 2005 or so a buddy got started using Roman names for servers. Dido, Leptis, Aeneas, Ulysses, Spartacus. My home computers are super heros/villains. Superman, ironman, greenlantern, jeangrey, magneto, thing, hulk.
- alanh 17y agoFor my own devices, I just name them anything related to space exploration. I make it memorable and appropriate. Launchpad was where I did all my creative work. Pocket Rocket was a Mac Mini. My iPod was Cassini (comparatively small / weak spacecraft); when I lost it, I posthumously renamed it Atlantis (after the Shuttle). Originally I named devices after computer science visionaries — the computer I built, I named Kilby, after Jack Kilby.
- duck 17y agoI once used programming languages for a small lab. They were identical machines and the weird thing was 'java' was the slowest and 'arc' always needed to be rebooted.
- dotBen 17y agof@@k, s@@t, c@@t, crap, fart, bollocks, ar@e, etc all work great for computer names for me.
- dotBen 17y agoI knew I would risk karma on this one. but I'm not trolling, and these are the names of my computers and servers. It has worked well for me for years.
- jff 17y agoI just name them after whatever I feel like. Among them: alpha, hiro, zoidberg, LOKI (VMS box), fafnir, glenda, p9, illiac, jerq, perq, and beer.
- JeanPierre 17y agoI think the idea is straightforward: Use short names you use rarely, and preferably give all your computer a theme. I'm currently using Greek Gods, but surely Roman Gods should be just as efficient. Planets should work as well, if you include imaginary planets (From, say, Star Wars)
- Lazlo_Nibble 17y agoI usually pick a name based on some piece of music that's nearby the first time I get asked to set one. Sleepwalk (Santo & Johnny), Skyscraper (Underworld), Hinterland (William Orbit), Zoolookologie (Jean-Michel Jarre)...
- binarymax 17y agoMy names are always the planets, and 'SOL' is always the name of my PDC.
- ivenkys 17y agoGoogle sets and Greek mythological figures . For my personal list of 7 computers that's fine.
- kmano8 16y agoThe twelve classical olympians were always enough for me, too.
- ErrantX 17y agoI use random names from Firefly - there is actually a goodly number of you think about it for a bit.
- tdmackey 17y agoI use names of Star Wars planets and my wireless ssid is The Outer Rim
- ableal 17y agoAmusing take: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/22/verity_stob_name_your_pc/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/22/verity_stob_name_you... - Don't call me Ishmael - Choosing a name for your new PC
- riobard 17y agoI'm following the Futura characters. My Unibody MacBook is called Bender because it indeed has a shining metal ass (although different kind of metal) :D
- davidw 17y agoThis is, incidentally, the same Don Libes of Expect and Tcl fame.
- mfr 17y agoAt the risk of self-promotion, a while back I did a presentation on naming schemes for network devices, which have slightly different requirements than servers: http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog31/abstracts.php?pt=NjExJm5hbm9nMzE=&nm=nanog31 http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog31/abstracts.php?pt=NjExJ...
- blogimus 17y agoWe used Babylon 5 characters on one network, but kept getting "duplicate name exists on network" when we got to "Zathras"
- Keyframe 17y agoMy workstation is named Casper, because it had a fried motherboard and I thought it was dead. Other option was Lazarus. Notebook is Pegasus, because it's powerful and can "fly around". Render nodes are RNn.
- paulshort 17y agoMy main home computer, a laptop, is named Workhorse. But after seeing some of the creative naming techniques people in this thread have used, the next machine(s) added to my home network will be named using Klingon swear words. I quite like the idea of using the word 'petaQ' to name a computer, especially if it happens to be a Windows machine.
- systemtrigger 17y agoI want a computer like Tony Stark's in Iron Man, so named mine Jarvis.
- pcarmichael 17y agoI've gone the Lord of the Rings route before using locations: shire, barrowdowns, moria, lothlorien, isengard, mordor, rivendell, etc. The only bad thing was that only about one in ten people knew how to spell isengard.
- patrickk 17y agoIn college, I had a lecturer who named companies in an assignment after characters in The Wire (Avon Barksdale etc). It's possible he downloaded this from the internet though. It certainly made things a little more interesting.
- ryane 17y agoRoman emperors: augustus, tiberius, caligula, claudius, etc.
- pg 17y agoWe used Tintin characters: tintin, haddock, calculus, snowy.
- statictype 17y agoGoing on a tangent: Did you read Tintin while living in America? Because from what I've understood, those comics are almost unheard of there. Is that not true?
- starkfist 17y agoI've seen many volumes of Tintin at the bookstores in NYC, both independent shops and Barnes & Noble. I also remember them from youth, but wasn't a big fan. I don't think they are super popular, but have been available.
- pg 17y agoI don't know about the rest of America, but they were pretty well known in Cambridge, where I first discovered them.
- projectileboy 16y agoLast summer, I went through the whole series with my kids as bedtime stories (minus Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America, which are a little beyond my PC threshold). We loved them! I have no idea why every kid in America doesn't slurp them up like candy.
- gbookman 16y agoBlisterin' barnacles! I was introduced to Tintin with the animated series on Nickelodeon. Probably watched too much TV when I was a lad
- poutine 17y agoMy most successful naming scheme was using the names of Cheeses. There's a crapload of cheeses out there.
- callahad 17y agoI'm quite fond of using typefaces -- you can be surprisingly descriptive: Arial (laptop), Futura (internet tablet), Minion (home server), Courier (router), Perpetua (VPS), etc.
- a-j-h 17y agoI have in the past used characters from the Wheel of Time. Currently using types of peppers in work. Using characters or items from Neuromancer for personal stuff. My netbook is onosendai.
- rikthevik 17y agoTransformers names have worked well for me. FortressMaximus and OmegaSupreme being some highlights.
- calcnerd256 17y agoMy naming convention is naming conventions. My server is named slogan, my tablet is named color, my netbook is named protagonist, my car (a Nissan Quest) is named Tribe, my ad-hoc wireless network's ssid is synonym, my external drive is named planet, and my server's replacement will be named category.
- wanderr 17y agoOur sysadmin insists on using numbers to name systems, in combination with an abbreviation representing the OS. For example, RHL015 is our 15th server running CentOS (Red Hat Linux). It's quite maddening!