16 ms·

Choosing a Name for Your Computer (1990)

162 points by elorm 3y ago

innerbits 3y ago
I use IATA (3 letters) or ICAO (4 letters) airport codes which make for nice and short host names.
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  That’s a good one! I’ll probably steal that in the future. I like systems which have a long human name and a shorter code. Very nice.
jl6 3y ago
I have a series of VMs named after the elements, with the final octet of the IP address being the atomic number. Has worked well so far…
- yabones 3y ago
  By convention, all of your router interfaces (or multilayer switches) would have to be Hydrogen. Makes sense, given its abundance in the universe.
- johnchristopher 3y ago
  What about VM with multiple NIC ?
  - cyclotron3k 3y ago
    Oh, that's chrome vanadium
mikro2nd 3y ago
One place we named all the (Unix) machines with names beginning with a 'C': cbed, cnic, cweed, csun (a Sun box, of course!), cmen,... We were (obvs?) developing in C, and our office was known in the company as "C-centre". All seemed to make sense at the time.
- hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
  > cweed Obviously programming in C wasn't your only favorite pastime.
  - hprotagonist 3y ago
    lots of scuba diver sysops out there!
  - deaddabe 3y ago
    cmon
modderation 3y ago
I'd recommend a read of RFC 2100: The Naming of Hosts [1] for more on the matter, as naming choices may drive one as mad as a hatter! [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2100 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2100
jhickok 3y ago
The most useful naming scheme that I have seen in a professional setting for end-user computing is [OS]-[SerialNumber]. Win-asdf1234 is immediately telling for sysadmin types that spend a lot of time in Active Directory or an ITSM. If you were in a multi-location stop, perhaps a location code as well.
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  I like to give domain-joined computers the rights to modify some typically-unused AD attributes (givenName, surName, etc) on their own objects. I assign a Startup Script to populate make, model, serial, etc, into these unused attributes. These attributes are nice because their display specifiers allow them to be added to views in Active Directory Users and Computers very easily.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  In places I've worked that have done this, it has frequently led to problems. Those names are harder to tell someone verbally, are easier to confuse, and easier to fat-finger without noticing.
sumthinprofound 3y ago
we name devices based on the inventory asset tag we affix as a prefix + the acronym of the department the device is assigned to as the suffix. clean and consistent across thousands of devices.
- softgrow 3y ago
  I named computers in a church after biblical characters for a while and moved back to asset tags. You can never be sure how to spell Nebuchadnezzar and asset tags are sooo much easier.
aquova 3y ago
I would also recommend picking a system with a sizable pool of options. Naming my computers after the planets seemed like a fine idea, until you start living with someone and start adding Raspberry Pis and other devices around the home. Eight planets didn't quite cut it, and now I have an odd mix of mythological characters.
- gleenn 3y ago
  Maybe name the little Pis after moons? Seems fitting somehow and they keep finding more too!
  - aquova 3y ago
    My system was to have the machines be the planets, and then their drives would be the moons. It made it easy to remember which drives would be available on a given machine. However, it was also a problem when I wanted to add a second drive to Mercury and didn't have any options...
    - vikingerik 3y ago
      You could use spacecraft that have visited Mercury, which would get you up to three at least.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- EvanAnderson 3y ago
  I used Jovian moons at one site because I knew it would be likely I’d get more names later. >smile<
Daub 3y ago
When I was a student, I called my computer 'brain in a jar'.
Vpr99 3y ago
Growing up, my dad named all his computers after native trees and plants where we were living. (e.g. Redwood) I’ve carried on doing that! Currently the main computers in the house are Cottonwood, Prickly Pear, Hackberry, and Honeylocust.
- sgtnoodle 3y ago
  I name my wifi SSID after the last place I lived.
  - TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
    My phone's wifi hotspot is named Telcontar, meaning Strider in Quenya. It seemed somehow appropriate.
    - mcv 3y ago
      My wifi password is the date I first met my wife. It's very helpful having to remember that date.
- digging 3y ago
  Texas? I like that scheme. I find it meaningful to name things in my life after things in my natural environment. Helps me remember that I exist inside it.
  - Vpr99 3y ago
    Colorado! Agreed. I spend my 9-5 staring at a screen so it’s nice even in a small way to remember other stuff is going on outside :)
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  I like that.
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
I like tying the scheme to the domain. For instance, mine has always been starfleet.mil. Forever non-public domain. Lots of options for host names. (I've never been able to figure out a cohesive way to do this for Star Wars.) If you were going for deities, maybe olympus.<something> for Greek gods. Wherever the pantheon is supposed to be homed. Hinduism would give you more host names than you could (probably) ever use...
- goodells 3y ago
  Your mentioning the pantheon gave me a flashback to how one of my old companies named their non-prod environments. The dev environment services were named after all the Greek gods, and the QA/demo environment services after the Roman gods. It was so horribly confusing…
  - TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
    Yeah... I've seen this too. You really have to know your mythology to keep those 2 straight. I'd have made one of them Norse. ;-)
- yamtaddle 3y ago
  Before I started using zfs and drive names stopped mattering, I'd name my personal storage drives after heroes from the Iliad, and the corresponding backup drives after the heroes' wives.
- pimlottc 3y ago
  .mil is an valid (restricted) tld [0], and has been for a long time. And while starfleet.mil is still currently unregistered, I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed given recent trends [1]… 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mil 1: https://www.spaceforce.mil/ https://www.spaceforce.mil/
- lightspot21 3y ago
  Hmm, a similar scheme we used at a previous workplace - lots of references to ancient Greek philosophers, historians and of course deities.
causi 3y ago
I'm boring. I always just name my computers their CPU name. Like my previous desktop before my current one was "4670K".
- once_inc 3y ago
  w-what happens when you replace the cpu?
  - tored 3y ago
    The RFC allows renaming of computers. I have done that a few times.
EvanAnderson 3y ago
My favorites that my business partner and I used at Customer sites: - Jovian moons - Trees - Constellations - U.S. state capitol cities - Chemical elements
- kps 3y ago
  I use chemical elements at home. They have nice short abbreviations that can be used mnemonically, e.g. mo (molybdenum) is my modem and pr (praseodymium) is my printer. And if I somehow lose DNS and /etc/hosts on every machine, I can still look up their IPv4 addresses in a book.
  - mjmsmith 3y ago
    I've been rotating a subset of these for years: jqa mvb whh jkp usg rbh jag caa wht wgh fdr hst dde jfk lbj
    - alchemist1e9 3y ago
      That is another useful short and long scheme as long as one needs under 46 and I wonder if any are duplicated yet?
ochrist 3y ago
I use the last name of science fiction authors for my machines, and the first character is a hint to the usage. E.g. NAS is Niven, Web server is Wells etc. (don't ask me for the name of the developer box).
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > (don't ask me for the name of the developer box). Stephenson?
  - ochrist 3y ago
    It starts with Philip K.
mianosm 3y ago
Coming from a systems background (administrator, engineer, and architect for many years): this is horrendous, but insightful as to how things were back when it was written. Coming up with a uniform, concise, and easily decipherable scheme is really the best for naming nodes on a network (be it at your home, or in a data center with 10s of thousands of machines (virtual and physical)). GUID is a bit extreme, but leveraging DDNS, and having a plan is always the best (and not naming things after a finite index like: planets, cartoon characters, mythological objects, or models).
ahofmann 3y ago
Back in the day, we named the computers of our customers by tv shows or movies (futurama) and the disks inside them after the characters (fry, zoidberg, etc.). Worked well.
teddyh 3y ago
A rare gem. Now cue all the people, not having read it, chiming in with comments of the form “What I use is… [something which the RFC recommends against doing]”.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dale_glass 3y ago
  The RFC is long obsolete. The world changed a lot since 1990.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    All the things which the RFC recommends against are still all bad practices, for reasons which have not changed. Modern server “cattle” style naming, which I assume you have in mind, is actually explicitly mentioned as a reasonable idea in the RFC text.
    - dale_glass 3y ago
      Some can be ignored in modern times. Eg, nothing wrong with naming the webserver simply "web". Particularly in modern times where it's going to be a VM/container, and never do anything else. Also nothing wrong with naming your laptop after yourself. Laptops weren't much of a thing in 1990, these days everyone at my company has their own. And seeing a login or packets on tcpdump from "bob.example.com" is very much helpful.
      - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
        That's all well and good until you hire Web and Dev.
        zumu 3y ago
        I'd like to welcome our newest team member, Cloud Prod!
jmillikin 3y ago
If you're going to be naming a lot of computers, it's surprisingly important to pick a naming format that is (1) expandable and (2) trivially parseable. The naming scheme that seems simple when you're in a garage can be constraining when there's too many to track in a spreadsheet. My favored format is somewhat complex in terms of layout, but is compact and easy to read once you get used to it: IATA code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IATA_airport_code) Cluster number (digits) 'r' (for "rack") \______ if meaningful for you Rack number / (ignore for EC2/GCP) 'm' (for "machine") Machine number An example hostname might be `dls1r56m10.mycompany-prod.com`. Alternatives that don't work as well: * Don't use a fixed-width field anywhere. Google used two-letter cluster names, and when those ran out they discovered that the two-letter assumption had worked its way into every layer of the stack. One of the important core services had `uint16_t cluster` in its wire protocol. * Don't make up your own cluster names. Don't use names like "northwest" or "east". IATA codes are your friend and you will love them because someone else already decided what they should be and wrote them down. * Don't use fields without delimiters. Being able to say "read digits until the next non-digit" is incredibly useful when writing ad-hoc parsers in shell scripts, because those parsers won't break when you bring up the first datacenter with more than 99 racks. If you tell people not to write hacky ad-hoc parsers in shell scripts, they will (1) do so anyway and (2) not tell you. * Don't leave off the cluster number. Yes, you only have one cluster in us-west-2 right now, but maybe in five years you'll need to have more than one because you want to run 30,000 EC2 instances there but all your per-cluster infrastructure software falls over at 20,000 instances. Then you can just turn up "pdx2" instead of trying to explain to Hashicorp engineers why you want to run the world's biggest Consul cluster. * Do not put the production hostnames under a subdomain of your corporate website. If you are ACME LLC then your hostnames should end with `.acme-prod.com` instead of `.prod.acme.com`. The same is true of corporate IT assets like laptops or workstations (`acme-corp.com` -- NEVER `.corp.acme.com`). Why? Browser cookies.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- tambre 3y ago
  > IATA code (3 characters) What do you do if there's no airport?
mrfinn 3y ago
Coolest thing I did in the past about that was to name the servers of a start up in which I participated after the characters/places of "The Odyssey": Penelope, Telemaco, Itaca...
lelag 3y ago
For people that likes to stay in a given theme: I worked in a company that was using pokemon names for hostnames. Given there seem to be close to a thousand of them now, it's probably not such a bad idea for a small network where you don't expect more than a few hundreds host at a given time.
- aconst 3y ago
  Same thing where I currently work at :D It begun with skydiving location, as the guy in charge of PC administration is a diver, then he switched to pokemon as he figured out it was easier to take the next pokemon in the list. Considering we are only about 25 people at work, we have a long way to go before running out of names...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
__d 3y ago
There's a cattle vs pets argument here. When naming "pets", thematic names are nice: Tolkien characters, words-starting-with, deities, elements, plants, animals, etc. When naming "cattle", schemes that have fairly intricate coded meanings and numerical elements generate things like LDW21-0743 (London, Desktop, Windows, 2021, number 743). Somewhere between 50 and 100 machines and you need to transition, and it can be surprisingly traumatic.
- amelius 3y ago
  I named my pet after my neighbor.
  - teddyh 3y ago
    Do you call your neighbor “Human Nigel”¹? 1. https://twitter.com/DawgBelly/status/862786851072909312 https://twitter.com/DawgBelly/status/862786851072909312
- schwartzworld 3y ago
  We have a greyhound, and they are closer to cattle than pets at the beginning of their lives. Each dog has a unique combination of numbers tattooed in their ears. Then they are named according to a weird convention where litter-mates share a "first name" while having their own unique "second name". For example, my greyhound was named Del Sol Madison, and she had litter mates with names like Del Sol Martin, Del Sol Maxine, etc. These names are used for identifying the dogs, but they are not trained to respond to them because they aren't pets. Once we got her, we called her Maddie and that's just been her name ever since.
  - caseyohara 3y ago
    My family adopted a greyhound when I was a kid, was the sweetest dog. His track name was High Tech Kaddy Shack, we called him Kaddy.
- kbob 3y ago
  The RFC was written in 1990. Very few computers were cattle then.
neilv 3y ago
The first big Unix workstations site I worked at, at the same time as this RFC, the head sysadmin started naming SPARCstations after vacation destinations she liked (`cozumel`, `stcroix`, etc.). I guess it brightened up the all-gray cubicle farm. My hostname idea was to name network printers after trees (e.g., `pine`, `elm`). You can also make the hostname work with the FQDN. I once got the hostname `ilove.mit.edu`. I later got them to rename it to `ihavealovehaterelationshipwith.mit.edu`.
ncarroll 3y ago
I name for expected performance. A remote server named Arnie should be strong, reliable and always come back. A music server named Elvis serves music with elements from multiple genre and not mind being told what to do by someone who knows a lot less about how it does what it does (that'd be me) than it does. A back-up server named Methuselah should not die for a very, very, very long time. So far, it's been a successful scheme. Edited for missing words.
ineedasername 3y ago
In college our data systems ran various vaxen boxes, and there were few enough that they used planet names. Distinct, easy to remember, unlikely to clash with any other terminology. And had their needs grown beyond the 8 non-Earth planets (Earth wasn’t used, and Pluto was still a planet at the time) they could simply begin using the names of moons and other well know rocks flying about the solar system. In my own personal home setups I’ve followed the convention of choosing a from a religious pantheon the name of a god whose role most approximated— very loosely— whatever the system is going to be used for. I had a Hephaestus for a while that was a workhorse of a machine where I would work on special projects, etc.
jmbwell 3y ago
I would argue metadata does not belong in a device name. Location, OS, etc., should all be tracked in the device management system. The impulse to encode lots of metadata in a device name is reasonable, but less is more. Location, user, application, even OS can all change. What then does it mean for the device name? And how often do you need to distinguish between a laptop and a desktop, really? Name things uniquely, and as little beyond that as possible. If the system generates its own unique default (Windows) or manages its human-readable hostname on its own (Mac), use that. Let your device management tools tell you where it is, what model device it is, what OS it runs, etc., not to mention countless other things you’ll never fit in a name. I used to make exceptions for infrastructure, but with automated network management tools, I don’t even bother with that anymore. All that matters is that a device is represented in a database by a primary key, and I don’t even care what that is. The best naming convention is not to bother with conventions at all. Let the machines do that work.
- SkipperCat 3y ago
  We always had the location in the name. It really helps when you have multiple data centers. If a machine was to move from one data center to another, it would be renamed (or more probably rebuilt). Each DC had a different business usage, so knowing that immediately gave you context of what that machine should be doing. We also would also have the environment (prod or dev) in the name. It just gave you an immediate understanding of the sensitivity of the machine and therefore stopped/warned folks from doing crazy things in prod. Of course, YMMV, but I've always been a fan of names which give you context. Too much can be annoying but a little goes a long way.
  - jmbwell 3y ago
    Sure. And I would add that application identifiers can be a different problem domain. `app-dev.houston-1.example.com` would be a perfectly reasonable name for an application, whether it resolves to a host or a load balancer or a CDN endpoint or whatever. The underlying machines I still don’t really care about; they will register their availability in the cluster or whatever automatically, or else they’ll get names like “db” and “web” in the docker-compose file, or what have you. But sure, where a human might reasonably need to enter a name for a resource in order to access it, a brief descriptive name makes sense.
jhwhite 3y ago
I used to work for a state gov entity, one of the counties I worked with named their servers after Looney Toon characters. I always thought that was cool and fun. Where I worked named the servers after the departments. /sigh. Such boring.
jodrellblank 3y ago
> "Some more suggestions are: mythical places (e.g., Midgard, Styx, Paradise), mythical people (e.g., Procne, Tereus, Zeus), killers (e.g., Cain, Burr, Boleyn), babies (e.g., colt, puppy, tadpole, elver), collectives (e.g., passel, plague, bevy, covey), elements (e.g., helium, argon, zinc)" Mildly recursively, when I play at trying to name all the elements[1] in fifteen minutes, I think of the sets of things elements are named after. Geographic places (Europium, Londinium, Americium, Californium), laboratories (Berkelium, Lawrencium), people (Einsteinium, Nobelium, Curium, Seaborgium), astronomical things (Helium, Selenium, Plutonium, Uranium, Mercurium), things known in the ancient world (Silver/Argentum, Lead/Plumbum)... although it's never enough for me to get all of them. [1] https://www.sporcle.com/games/g/elements https://www.sporcle.com/games/g/elements
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Boleyn a "killer" seems a bit of a stretch. I counter-propose "HenryVIII" to take her place.
lexicality 3y ago
I very much disagree with the Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine section. If you know a machine (especially a server!) is going to be used for one thing, name it after that thing. If you get a second one, you wipe both and rename them to thing-1 and thing-2. If you move a machine, you absolutely wipe it! "I named the new search server "gohan" because the original search server was called "goku" because he's searching for the dragon balls" is cute on the surface, but then you have to explain to everyone that joke and then they have to remember it. No one's going to be confused by "search-new-2021".
- dale_glass 3y ago
  That's from 1990, which is firmly from the "pet" era, not "cattle". Computers were scarce and expensive, virtualization wasn't a thing. Any random machine might turn out to do DHCP, FTP and payroll, just because the software had to go somewhere and that particular machine had the spare resources and was hooked up to the right network.
- remram 3y ago
  That's a terrible name. New things don't stay new, do you just wipe it and reinstall it as "old" when it's not so new anymore?
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > If you get a second one, you wipe both and rename them to thing-1 and thing-2. Am I the only one who finds it a pain in the butt to rename an existing machine? So many things have to be updated when I do that...
  - lexicality 3y ago
    It's slightly easier if you treat it as if you have thrown that machine away and bought two new ones that you're setting up to replace the old one
cdelsolar 3y ago
My home computers are "themonolith" because it's a too-big rectangular prism that kinda looks like a monolith, and pi1 / pi2. Kind of uncreative and now I want to name them after something cooler.
SkipperCat 3y ago
When you only have a few computers to manage, have fun with names. But when you start to have hundreds (or thousands) of computers, you really need a naming convention. At that point, you're dealing with multiple environments, locations and business units. Being able to glean that information from a name is very helpful. Also, at that scale, names are never permanent. You're renaming (or rebuilding) hosts as they change location and usage. The worst is when you scale up from a small firm where all the hosts are named after movie characters and all services are hard coded to those names. Been there, its rough....
danaris 3y ago
For many years, I named my (personal) computers after fictional AIs—starting with the Marathon series, so the first two in this set were Durandal and Leela. More recently, I have been naming them after the cats in Diane Duane's Feline Wizards series (which begins with The Book of Night with Moon); however, having run through Rhiow, Saash, Urruah, and Arhu, I'm going to have to find a new naming scheme for my next one!
deleted 3y ago
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vermilingua 3y ago
Culture Ship names [1] have served me well for many years now. I thought I’d have run out by now, but coming up with variations has extended the pool quite a bit. [1] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft
- shrimp_emoji 3y ago
  They're just so long though! :B `ssh foo@the-precise-nature-of-the-catastrophe`
- Eric_WVGG 3y ago
  Same :) but after a decade or so I decided to flip to “side characters from Adventure Time” (currently writing from Huntress Wizard, tethered to Rootbeer Guy)
nbk_2000 3y ago
In case anyone wants to see the Gary Larson illustration mentioned in the RFC: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2245214_Choosing_a_Name_for_your_Computer https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2245214_Choosing_a_...
sowbug 3y ago
unfair-wagon quiz-rocket lake-flag These seem to adhere to the guidelines. I have been using https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ for a while to name VMs. Generate 15 words, pick a pair that I can visualize, and I'm done.
davidblue 3y ago
Though I can't imagine this is going to be particularly constructive, I've spent a lifetime on the lookout for any opportunity to brag about the names I've given various hardware devices because they're quite funny. Perhaps - for end users/non-admins - it'd be best to point first to a list of "favorite" names?? Here are my favorites of mine, which have all notably performed the function of a unique system name quite admirably: - Gravel (iPhone 8 Plus) - Jorts (iPhone 12 Pro Max) - Hildur (Desktop PC) - [Kudzu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu) (iPad Pro) - Winterkorn (Wireless OBD2 Scanner)
JohnFen 3y ago
For naming all the machines on my home network, I go with the theme of "kinds knives or blades". I like the symbolism (knives are symbolic of logical thought). The only problem is that I have a lot of machines, and am running out of names!
- tacitusarc 3y ago
  My fiancé runs a knife factory. There are so many names. Perhaps you just need to embrace some of the more descriptive names! “Folding Hunter Knife - Nickel Silver Drop Point”
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    That would be one way! But I also want the names to be relatively short and contain no spaces or non-alphanumeric characters, because I type them in a lot. I still have 20 or so left on my "future names" list. I'm now into names of knife types in the African continent.
darkstar999 3y ago
I don’t know much about RFCs. It’s amusing to see this doc cut into “pages”. I wonder if there’s a meta-RFC proposing that this was no longer needed.
deleted 3y ago
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icepat 3y ago
I have for a while, and will for the foreseeable future, name my computers `terminal`. It started as a joke, but has turned into a habit. Every device I own is named that, with the exception of my cellphone, which is named `phone`.
riffic 3y ago
it's probably a good idea to put "RFC 1178" in the title.
deleted 3y ago
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LinuxBender 3y ago
I intentionally violate this RFC for workstations and laptops. Some applications leak client hostnames to remote servers. I prefer to keep it bland. For public servers I would say I am in alignment and would only add I keep server names and domain names programmatic, short and simple enough for anyone inebriated to type. It's worked out well thus far. uname -n localhost
theandrewbailey 3y ago
Some of my machines are references to LoadingReadyRun's Installation Anxiety[0][1] sketch. When I was in college ~15 years ago, I built a file server, so I named it toilet. I eventually put a web server on it too, and when I replaced the hardware, I named it gram, but my blog code still retains the old name[2]. And yes, I named my router dishwasher. I'm dead set against IoT, so naming my computers after fixtures or appliances hasn't caused conflicts. [0] https://wiki.loadingreadyrun.com/index.php/Installation_Anxiety https://wiki.loadingreadyrun.com/index.php/Installation_Anxi... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajW2fDy41fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajW2fDy41fY [2] https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet
dfxm12 3y ago
If I need to name a personal computer, I will name it after a famous computer, like DeepThought.
miroljub 3y ago
I use porn star names to name computers in my company network. It's easy to claim that "lisaann" and "peternorth" are just randomly invented names, and then watch some corporate drone blushing and struggling when asked to explain why they find those names inappropriate.
- fknorangesite 3y ago
  Yikes.
- urda 3y ago
  Big yikes, that's a hostile work environment and is a huge risk for your HR I am sure. I would not be comfortable working with such conditions, and would be sure to let my HR rep know.
  - danwee 3y ago
    Perhaps I missed the irony. But why do you think that is hostile?
    - tom_ 3y ago
      I suspect you'd just disagree or fail to understand if it were explained. Safest to just trust the implied advice in this instance!
      - stouset 3y ago
        “We’ll I don’t find it inappropriate so it’s completely impossible for me to bother trying to understand why someone else might.”
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    - GMoromisato 3y ago
      Most porn objectifies women and many employees are women who do not like being objectified. Perhaps I missed the irony.
DonHopkins 3y ago
I stuffed the RFC into GPT and asked for a summary, and asked it to write 10 examples of each point. It "hallucinated" an interesting elaboration of the "use real words" rule that wasn't mentioned in the RFC: >Use real words: >- Unreal words: Zibber, Quibbit, Wuzzo, Brumple, Kwozzle, Gliggern, Drimble, Fopple, Zinkern, Thribble >- Real words: Pulsar, Fusion, Vector, Quantum, Catalyst, Dynamo, Nexus, Zephyr, Vortex, Phoenix So I asked it, "Give me a list of 100 silly unreal words that are good computer names." And it generated a hilarious list of silly unreal words for computer names that obeyed all the other rules too. >Blibber Flibbit Zoggly Snarfle Quizzix Jibberix Flumble Snootle Jumblex Skrungle Flibberish Squozzle Buzzlequib Zumblequack Skrizzik Glibbergen Squibble Wibbleshack Zibberflap Quabblefudge Kwozzler Skrubble Jibberlump Squibbleton Quacklebum Wuzzlequorp Flibberquill Zibberplush Quozzletuck Grubblefrush Jumblezor Squigglemuff Quabbleblurt Buzzlekringle Skrubblefrimp Blibbertron Glibberspark Wuzzlethrump Flibblecrust Zibberklax Quozzlegruff Flumblezest Jibberclump Squibblethorp Skrungleblast Zumblequax Grubbleflink Flibbersprout Buzzlegrit Quacklepuff Blibberchomp Snootleburst Glibberzilch Squozzleflop Kwozzlespork Skrubblemunch Zumblethrift Quozzlequench Flibblegrit Jibberplank Squibblezorb Quacklethrift Flumblezax Wuzzlesplat Glibberfluff Blibbersketch Zibberfrizzle Squozzleblimp Grubblequark Buzzlekrunch Skrunglefluff Zumblecrunch Quozzlefrump Flibbersquatch Jibberflit Squibblekrush Blibberblitz Wuzzleflank Skrubblespook Zumblekrunk Quackleflunk Grubblesmirk Squozzlefrimp Buzzleplunk Flibblezorp Glibberplush Jibberclank Squibblesmudge Blibbergrit Zibberzorch Wuzzlequench Kwozzlesplurge Skrunglethrift Flumbleblimp Quozzlesmirk Buzzlefluff Grubblethwack Zumblegrit Quackleblurt Squibbleplush They seemed to have certain patterns to them, so I asked: "Describe in words the linguistic and other techniques you used to come up with that list of silly words." >Sure, the process of generating a list of silly, unreal words involves several linguistic and creative techniques: >Phonotactics: Phonotactics is the study of the rules governing the possible phoneme sequences in a language. In creating these words, I adhered to the phonotactic rules of English, ensuring that the combinations of sounds were plausible for English speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics >Phonaesthetics: This is the study of the inherent pleasantness (euphony) or unpleasantness (cacophony) of the sound of certain words, phrases, and sentences. To come up with silly words, I chose combinations that are typically associated with a humorous or whimsical sound in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonaesthetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonaesthetics >Combining Familiar Sounds: To create these unreal words, I combined familiar sounds and syllables from English in new and unusual ways. This increases the chances that the words will be pronounceable and memorable, while still being novel and silly. >Consonant-Vowel Structure: Most of the words follow a basic consonant-vowel structure, which is common in English and makes the words easier to pronounce. >Morpheme Mixing: Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language. In English, we can combine morphemes in different ways to create new words. In this case, I combined various nonsensical morphemes to create new, unreal words. >Influence of Existing Words: Some of the created words might resemble or remind you of existing words in English. This was intentional as these associations can make the words sound more familiar and easier to remember, while still being clearly unreal. >Humorous Connotations: Many of these words were designed to have humorous or whimsical connotations. This was achieved by choosing sounds and syllable combinations that are often associated with humor, silliness, or absurdity in English. >Variety: In creating this list, I sought to ensure a wide variety of sounds, syllable counts, and levels of complexity. This increases the overall silliness of the list and ensures that there are words that will appeal to different tastes. >Remember, though, that creating silly, unreal words is a highly creative process and there are no hard-and-fast rules. The most important thing is to have fun with it and create words that make you smile! I've never heard of Phonaesthetics or Phonaesthetics (but they sound plausible and pleasant ;) ), so I asked: "To elaborate about Phonaesthetics and Phonaesthetics, give me as many explicit examples of possible of how those techniques apply to the list of computer names you generated above." >Sure, here's how the principles of phonotactics and phonaesthetics apply to some of the silly, unreal words I created as potential computer names: >Phonotactics: >"Brungle": This word adheres to English phonotactic rules, in which a single consonant or consonant cluster ("br") can be followed by a vowel ("u"), and then ending in a consonant or consonant cluster ("ngle"). >"Fribzoot": Again, "fribzoot" starts with a valid English consonant cluster ("fr"), followed by a short vowel ("i"), another consonant cluster ("bz"), a vowel ("oo"), and ends with a consonant ("t"). >"Blupzark": This word adheres to the English phonotactic rules with a valid consonant cluster ("bl") followed by a short vowel ("u"), a consonant ("p"), another consonant cluster ("z"), a vowel ("a"), and ending with a consonant ("rk"). >"Tringwop": Here, "tr" is a common consonant cluster, followed by a short vowel ("i"), a consonant cluster ("ng"), a vowel ("o"), and a final consonant ("p"). Each part of the word is a permissible combination in English. >Phonaesthetics: >"Snorkwib": This word has a whimsical sound to it, due to the combination of the "sn" sound at the beginning, often associated with words like "snicker" and "sneak", and the "wib" at the end, which is an uncommon but still pronounceable combination in English. >"Quibnorf": The use of "qu" at the beginning adds a quirky, whimsical sound, while the ending "-norf" adds to the absurdity, reminding one of words like "dwarf". >"Glibfraz": The "glib-" prefix may remind us of the word "glib", giving a sense of smooth, quick wit. The "-fraz" suffix has a zany, fun feel to it. >"Plonkstir": The beginning, "plonk", may bring to mind the English onomatopoeic word 'plonk', giving a playful, silly feel. The ending "-stir" balances it with a more usual word ending. >Phonotactic rules ensure that the created words are plausible and pronounceable to English speakers, even though they are entirely made up. Phonaesthetics, on the other hand, contributes to the silliness, whimsy, and overall appeal of the words, making them suitable and memorable as computer names. >Please note that while these linguistic principles can guide the process, the creation of such words also involves a considerable degree of creativity and intuition. These techniques are also useful for generating memorable nice sounding company and product names, too!
at_a_remove 3y ago
For my private network, I used The Black Company for characters. Logging on CROAKER. Primary Domain Controller would be DOMIN8R; Backup Domain Controller is THELADY. Heavy wizardry on ONEEYE or GOBLIN. Various servers got CATCHER, SHIFTER, LIMPER, and the like.
Macha 3y ago
I've had the same naming scheme for my personal devices for about 15 years now. The word list is from a show I was watching at the time. Workstations are protagonists, servers are antagonists, mobile devices are child characters. Last year I finally exhausted names from the first show and added a second one to my name list. Is it more logical to name them things like phone-2023-1 and cloud-server-5 - sure. But the reality is my personal infrastructure is going to max out at like 40 concurrent devices, and that's including stuff like network devices which does get more "practical" names (like office-ap-1, tv-switch-1) since I rarely ssh into them. So may as well have a little fun with naming
farnerup 3y ago
The best theme is to use brands of scotch.
- forinti 3y ago
  A friend of mine used liquor names and put the corresponding bottle on top of each machine.
aftbit 3y ago
My personal laptops, workstations, and servers (all pets of course) have the following names, in no particular order: tron, finch, wintermute, sparrowhawk, axolotl, rook, moneta, mengpo, odessa, ithaca, turing, lovelace
- linker3000 3y ago
  I had a small DC at work that included Turing and Lovelace, plus: Wilkes, Babbage amd Hopper.
  - vincent-manis 3y ago
    My home wifi SSID is Marsnet, and my machines are all named after Martian surface features. So there's olympus and pavonis, arcadia and xanthe, and so on. I'm typing this on syrtis-major. I'm hoping not to run out of surface features.
jdblair 3y ago
Computers as pets!
yazantapuz 3y ago
I use macross characters' names to baptize my computers.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  At home, I use characters from the first anime I watched as a digisub concurrent with it airing in Japan. It had considerably more female characters than male, so I use the male names for printers.
freedude 3y ago
I strive for a list of names that are shorter than 6 characters each. Usually it will follow a theme. In 20+ years of IT I have set up a couple of networks of systems. Some past themes... Characters of the current book series I am reading. Hunger Games, Star Wars, Star Trek, C. S. Lewis Novels, Tolkien Novels, Louis L'Amour Novels Trees, plants, flowers, etc... Clouds Snakes, birds, etc... The important thing is to be unique, memorable and thwart the 'cattle' people.
srvmshr 3y ago
I named all my computers and VMs after sword or sword namesakes e g. Katana, Excalibur, Scimitar etc. All my versioning names also follow some popular project's version names e.g. x86 & amd64 internal designations or codenames. Similarly, for smaller versioning tasks I have used Fedora Project's release names. I just do it to learn something along the way as well. It just gives the different entities I work on a personalized touch.
sokoloff 3y ago
I used to carefully name all of our computers. Starting a few years ago, I stopped even knowing the names of most of the physical machines on my home network. Sure, I'd have to go to the DHCP reservations list to figure out the name of my kids' computers to remote into them. The VMs and containers on my proxmox server are all named after the service and a trailing number. Plex is plex1, file servers are fs#, unifi controller is unifi1, etc. Once having a VM or container became essentially free, it mostly eliminated the need to think up or remember names.
justinlloyd 3y ago
The RFC is for a different time and place. Though some of the principles still stand and I have deployed/used many of them, but not all are applicable. I'm not saying my scheme is perfect, or even very good, but it works for my needs and I've used the following convention for around 30+ years. I've got two schemes, one for small sites/personal installations, and one for big sites. w for workstations. t for tables. p for printers. c for cameras. a for access points. s for servers. m for mobiles/cellphones. v for vms. i for iot devices. u for "devices we don't know how to designate." x for sensors, e.g water leak sensor, package delivery box sensor. Obviously if you only have three devices in your entire home, it doesn't really make sense to have a "naming scheme." For personal installations and small sites (not an exhaustive list): a-studio-ap6 (access point in studio) a-catbathroom-ap6pro (access point in cats' bathroom) a-workshop-ap6 (access point in the workshop) a-rv-aplr (access point in the rv) w-lloyd-vr (workstation, household VR/gaming computer) w-justin-storm (workstation, storm is the CPU case manufacturer) l-justin-surfacebook2 (my surface laptop) l-joyce-surfacebook2 (wife's surface laptop) l-joyce-surfacestudio (wife's surface laptop) l-justin-mbp2013 (my old macbook) p-office-hp3600 (office printer) p-workshop-konica (konica minolta printer in workshop) p-office-canon (office printer) v-justin-ubuntu (virtualized linux) v-justin-arch (virtualized linux) v-justin-win10 (virtualized linux) t-lloyd-weather (samsung table for weather) t-lloyd-ipad00 t-lloyd-ipad01 c-lloyd-frontdoor (camera at front door) c-lloyd-garagedoor (camera on outside of garage door) c-lloyd-garageceiling (camera on the garage ceiling) s-lloyd-main (main home server) s-lloyd-backup (backup server) s-lloyd-storage (backup server at the storage locker) s-lloyd-cloud (our racked server in some midwest datacenter) s-lloyd-rv (server in the rv) m-joyce-pixel6 (wife's cellphone) m-justin-pixelpro7 (cellphone belonging to me) m-justin-note20 (cellphone belonging to me) m-justin-iphone13 (cellphone belonging to me) The local machine is given the name, though some cannot be easily renamed, or they have a restriction such as NETBIOS name length, and then the MAC is also set with a name on the router too, so magic packets and other tools know what the device is named even if the device is not broadcasting any name. It helps with identifying mystery devices on the network, and who owns the device. I apply the same principle to naming cats and people. "grey-cat", "black-cat", "fuzzy-black-cat", "pink-human", "mao" (cat), "cat", "cath" (also cat), "orange-cat", "chat" (also cat), "gatto" (cat). For large sites with dozens or hundreds of servers or multiple sites/data centers: IATA codes with rack and machine name and absolutely nothing creative, and clear separators between each part. e.g. lax-r01-s17. And then I make sure that any publicly accessible machines sit on their own "prod" domain separate from the company's main domain, e.g. hn-prod.com, or bigcorp-prod.com
ta8903 3y ago
I remember a site that had a long list of themed names sorted by the number of elements in a set. Eg. 7 colours of a rainbow, 8 planets, etc. I lost it and can't for the life of me remember what it was called. Anyone have an idea?
dang 3y ago
Related: RFC 1178: Choosing a Name for Your Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35424550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35424550 - April 2023 (3 comments) RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054014 - Feb 2021 (121 comments) Choosing a Name for Your Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26027247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26027247 - Feb 2021 (1 comment) RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741009 - April 2018 (173 comments) Choosing a name for your computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5167998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5167998 - Feb 2013 (10 comments) Choosing names for your computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290106 - April 2010 (86 comments) Choosing a Name for Your Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110017 - Feb 2008 (9 comments)
thom 3y ago
Ah, I remember the day we retired the last machine named after a forest in Magic: the Gathering and shredded its soul into a thousand pieces, each of which adhered to one AWS service or another. I still feel guilty. Especially when the bill arrives each month.
marymkearney 3y ago
Do named computers also develop traits or personalities? Fragile | sturdy, balky | cooperative, high-maintenance | easygoing, spiteful | nice, etc.? Like, "oh, there goes Icarus again, it's always been contrary."
rbanffy 3y ago
After trying to convince the Ubuntu petname package maintainer to make the source-code PEP-8 compliant, I went on to build a JavaScript clone based on the spy tools listed in the Vault-7 leak. I called it `nsaname`. It's much more limited in possible combinations than petname, but it's perfect for naming secret projects. You can install it with `npm install nsaname`.
michaelteter 3y ago
This brings back great and terrible memories. There were so many arguments between otherwise reasonable people over server names. Some went for cute, some for mythology, some planetary (which can be quite limiting if you stick with only the home solar system), and finally my favorite - the purpose-based, numerically suffixed.
gglitch 3y ago
Written by Expect's own Don Libes :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Libes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Libes
gajon 3y ago
My computers and server are named: endgame, vortex, breakpoint, lucretia, hangar18, shewolf Megadeth song names.
euroderf 3y ago
What, no mention here of Japanese movie monsters ? It is a fine sysadmin tradition. godzilla and then the entire gallery of mutant rogues.
clnq 3y ago
Everyone here is talking about creative machine naming schemes, but almost every org in the world names machines with random strings, like what Windows OOBE generates by default. Sometimes the names are pre-OOBEd with scripts that generate images for new machines, but they are still mostly random. I have never seen a creative machine name in an academic or business setting. It's interesting how different HN is from most orgs. Honestly, even most home machines are randomly named, I think.
- dmurray 3y ago
  My 2000-person employer (in finance!) names desktop machines with dictionary words and a short seemingly random suffix. So you could be GIRAFFE84F, there won't typically be other giraffes. Servers get names that are concatenations of meaningful abbreviations that are meaningless to an outsider, you might be on nycfithro603. Actually I can't think of any org I've worked for that had random strings for its physical machines. Cloud VMs, yes (though not always).
  - clnq 3y ago
    My experience is completely different. Having worked in companies between 15 and 15k employees, I've never seen anything other than random strings. A while ago I wrote a script that uses GPT to generate some machine names and then check them for collisions with existing ones. So no suffixes needed. I thought I was innovating, hahaha. Very interesting.
killjoywashere 3y ago
for personal computers, I go for an uncommon four-letter. No curse words though.
omoikane 3y ago
Related: https://xkcd.com/910/ https://xkcd.com/910/
smcameron 3y ago
I once named a server hosting an RCS repo "fire", so that when someone asked about the source code I could reply, "It's on fire."
Dig1t 3y ago
>Words like "moron" or "twit" are good names if no one else is going to see them. But if you ever give someone a demo on your machine, you may find that they are distracted by seeing a nasty word on your screen. (Maybe their spouse called them that this morning.) Why bother taking the chance that they will be turned off by something completely irrelevant to your demo. I see their point, but I’m going to consciously ignore this advice because it makes my life more interesting.
rootbear 3y ago
A friend who worked at PARC in the 80s said they had printers named for snakes, such as copperhead, rattler, etc. The sales guy named his "trouser"...
roydivision 3y ago
Back in the day I worked for a small IT company that hadn't yet implemented DNS or DHCP, all machines including office PCs were named using periodically distributed hosts files. Reading this file was fun, to see the imagination slowly dwindle. The names started using the usual themes, planets, gases, Tolkien characters. By the end the names had degenerated into 'door', 'window', 'chair', 'pen'.
mcv 3y ago
I remember once coming across my-hostname-is-longer-than-yours.mit.edu. My university used ship types as names for their machines. Workstations (of which there were many) had a short 3-letter ship type followed by two digits. That worked very well. Privately I use fantasy/Science Fiction worlds. One of the first was discworld (it had a very large harddisk), and I stuck with it. I've had beleriand, dagobah, tatooine, and my most recently ferrix. Okay, mostly Star Wars planets, I guess.
mattpallissard 3y ago
For several years I've been using the naming conventions to drive configuration management and other tools. Ditched rack and DC identifiers years ago because. 1. Usually not a concern. 2. When it is, it's in ipam/dcim. Plus you can usually tell from ip address. A simple format is: app-specific-general-tierNN. foo-mysql-db-p01, foo-nginx-web-p01 Then data is nested in a hierarchy using hiera, saltstack, or custom merge behavior in cdktf. Since the names are most specific to least specific it's easy to apply configuration for each section, letting the most specific configuration override on merge. Easiest way to automate some of the annoying bare metal/vm requirements without bringing in or writing additional tools. You rack it, set the hostname in the idrac, then let dhcp and provisioning tools do their thing.
dbtonez 3y ago
for the company computers we do COMPANY ABBREVIATION-DEPARTMENT#number(-LT if mobile workstation). has worked out nicely so far but we are a small operation. for home, i use Iron Man characters. I like to name my main gaming PC as villains, like Iron Monger. I am a HUGE Spider-Man fan, but I admit I don't think it is as cool to see Doc Ock or Kraven as opposed to... War Machine... light up on the network. *edit - Monger not Mongrel
kjs3 3y ago
I have always had something on my personal network called 'kremvax' since the '80s. Now, it's back to being the name of an actual VAX. You had to be there...

162 points by elorm 3y ago

innerbits 3y ago

I use IATA (3 letters) or ICAO (4 letters) airport codes which make for nice and short host names.

alchemist1e9 3y ago
That’s a good one! I’ll probably steal that in the future. I like systems which have a long human name and a shorter code. Very nice.

jl6 3y ago

I have a series of VMs named after the elements, with the final octet of the IP address being the atomic number. Has worked well so far…

yabones 3y ago
By convention, all of your router interfaces (or multilayer switches) would have to be Hydrogen. Makes sense, given its abundance in the universe.
johnchristopher 3y ago
What about VM with multiple NIC ?
- cyclotron3k 3y ago
  Oh, that's chrome vanadium

mikro2nd 3y ago

One place we named all the (Unix) machines with names beginning with a 'C': cbed, cnic, cweed, csun (a Sun box, of course!), cmen,... We were (obvs?) developing in C, and our office was known in the company as "C-centre". All seemed to make sense at the time.

hdjjhhvvhga 3y ago
> cweed Obviously programming in C wasn't your only favorite pastime.
- hprotagonist 3y ago
  lots of scuba diver sysops out there!
- deaddabe 3y ago
  cmon

modderation 3y ago

I'd recommend a read of RFC 2100: The Naming of Hosts [1] for more on the matter, as naming choices may drive one as mad as a hatter! [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2100 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2100

jhickok 3y ago

The most useful naming scheme that I have seen in a professional setting for end-user computing is [OS]-[SerialNumber]. Win-asdf1234 is immediately telling for sysadmin types that spend a lot of time in Active Directory or an ITSM. If you were in a multi-location stop, perhaps a location code as well.

EvanAnderson 3y ago
I like to give domain-joined computers the rights to modify some typically-unused AD attributes (givenName, surName, etc) on their own objects. I assign a Startup Script to populate make, model, serial, etc, into these unused attributes. These attributes are nice because their display specifiers allow them to be added to views in Active Directory Users and Computers very easily.
JohnFen 3y ago
In places I've worked that have done this, it has frequently led to problems. Those names are harder to tell someone verbally, are easier to confuse, and easier to fat-finger without noticing.

sumthinprofound 3y ago

we name devices based on the inventory asset tag we affix as a prefix + the acronym of the department the device is assigned to as the suffix. clean and consistent across thousands of devices.

softgrow 3y ago
I named computers in a church after biblical characters for a while and moved back to asset tags. You can never be sure how to spell Nebuchadnezzar and asset tags are sooo much easier.

aquova 3y ago

I would also recommend picking a system with a sizable pool of options. Naming my computers after the planets seemed like a fine idea, until you start living with someone and start adding Raspberry Pis and other devices around the home. Eight planets didn't quite cut it, and now I have an odd mix of mythological characters.

gleenn 3y ago
Maybe name the little Pis after moons? Seems fitting somehow and they keep finding more too!
- aquova 3y ago
  My system was to have the machines be the planets, and then their drives would be the moons. It made it easy to remember which drives would be available on a given machine. However, it was also a problem when I wanted to add a second drive to Mercury and didn't have any options...
  - vikingerik 3y ago
    You could use spacecraft that have visited Mercury, which would get you up to three at least.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
EvanAnderson 3y ago
I used Jovian moons at one site because I knew it would be likely I’d get more names later. >smile<

Daub 3y ago

When I was a student, I called my computer 'brain in a jar'.

Vpr99 3y ago

Growing up, my dad named all his computers after native trees and plants where we were living. (e.g. Redwood) I’ve carried on doing that! Currently the main computers in the house are Cottonwood, Prickly Pear, Hackberry, and Honeylocust.

sgtnoodle 3y ago
I name my wifi SSID after the last place I lived.
- TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
  My phone's wifi hotspot is named Telcontar, meaning Strider in Quenya. It seemed somehow appropriate.
  - mcv 3y ago
    My wifi password is the date I first met my wife. It's very helpful having to remember that date.
digging 3y ago
Texas? I like that scheme. I find it meaningful to name things in my life after things in my natural environment. Helps me remember that I exist inside it.
- Vpr99 3y ago
  Colorado! Agreed. I spend my 9-5 staring at a screen so it’s nice even in a small way to remember other stuff is going on outside :)
nonethewiser 3y ago
I like that.

TheRealDunkirk 3y ago

I like tying the scheme to the domain. For instance, mine has always been starfleet.mil. Forever non-public domain. Lots of options for host names. (I've never been able to figure out a cohesive way to do this for Star Wars.) If you were going for deities, maybe olympus.<something> for Greek gods. Wherever the pantheon is supposed to be homed. Hinduism would give you more host names than you could (probably) ever use...

goodells 3y ago
Your mentioning the pantheon gave me a flashback to how one of my old companies named their non-prod environments. The dev environment services were named after all the Greek gods, and the QA/demo environment services after the Roman gods. It was so horribly confusing…
- TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
  Yeah... I've seen this too. You really have to know your mythology to keep those 2 straight. I'd have made one of them Norse. ;-)
yamtaddle 3y ago
Before I started using zfs and drive names stopped mattering, I'd name my personal storage drives after heroes from the Iliad, and the corresponding backup drives after the heroes' wives.
pimlottc 3y ago
.mil is an valid (restricted) tld [0], and has been for a long time. And while starfleet.mil is still currently unregistered, I wouldn’t be surprised if they changed given recent trends [1]… 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mil https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/.mil 1: https://www.spaceforce.mil/ https://www.spaceforce.mil/
lightspot21 3y ago
Hmm, a similar scheme we used at a previous workplace - lots of references to ancient Greek philosophers, historians and of course deities.

causi 3y ago

I'm boring. I always just name my computers their CPU name. Like my previous desktop before my current one was "4670K".

once_inc 3y ago
w-what happens when you replace the cpu?
- tored 3y ago
  The RFC allows renaming of computers. I have done that a few times.

EvanAnderson 3y ago

My favorites that my business partner and I used at Customer sites: - Jovian moons - Trees - Constellations - U.S. state capitol cities - Chemical elements

kps 3y ago
I use chemical elements at home. They have nice short abbreviations that can be used mnemonically, e.g. mo (molybdenum) is my modem and pr (praseodymium) is my printer. And if I somehow lose DNS and /etc/hosts on every machine, I can still look up their IPv4 addresses in a book.
- mjmsmith 3y ago
  I've been rotating a subset of these for years: jqa mvb whh jkp usg rbh jag caa wht wgh fdr hst dde jfk lbj
  - alchemist1e9 3y ago
    That is another useful short and long scheme as long as one needs under 46 and I wonder if any are duplicated yet?

ochrist 3y ago

I use the last name of science fiction authors for my machines, and the first character is a hint to the usage. E.g. NAS is Niven, Web server is Wells etc. (don't ask me for the name of the developer box).

JohnFen 3y ago
> (don't ask me for the name of the developer box). Stephenson?
- ochrist 3y ago
  It starts with Philip K.

mianosm 3y ago

Coming from a systems background (administrator, engineer, and architect for many years): this is horrendous, but insightful as to how things were back when it was written. Coming up with a uniform, concise, and easily decipherable scheme is really the best for naming nodes on a network (be it at your home, or in a data center with 10s of thousands of machines (virtual and physical)). GUID is a bit extreme, but leveraging DDNS, and having a plan is always the best (and not naming things after a finite index like: planets, cartoon characters, mythological objects, or models).

ahofmann 3y ago

Back in the day, we named the computers of our customers by tv shows or movies (futurama) and the disks inside them after the characters (fry, zoidberg, etc.). Worked well.

teddyh 3y ago

A rare gem. Now cue all the people, not having read it, chiming in with comments of the form “What I use is… [something which the RFC recommends against doing]”.

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dale_glass 3y ago
The RFC is long obsolete. The world changed a lot since 1990.
- teddyh 3y ago
  All the things which the RFC recommends against are still all bad practices, for reasons which have not changed. Modern server “cattle” style naming, which I assume you have in mind, is actually explicitly mentioned as a reasonable idea in the RFC text.
  - dale_glass 3y ago
    Some can be ignored in modern times. Eg, nothing wrong with naming the webserver simply "web". Particularly in modern times where it's going to be a VM/container, and never do anything else. Also nothing wrong with naming your laptop after yourself. Laptops weren't much of a thing in 1990, these days everyone at my company has their own. And seeing a login or packets on tcpdump from "bob.example.com" is very much helpful.
    - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
      That's all well and good until you hire Web and Dev.
      - zumu 3y ago
        I'd like to welcome our newest team member, Cloud Prod!

jmillikin 3y ago

If you're going to be naming a lot of computers, it's surprisingly important to pick a naming format that is (1) expandable and (2) trivially parseable. The naming scheme that seems simple when you're in a garage can be constraining when there's too many to track in a spreadsheet. My favored format is somewhat complex in terms of layout, but is compact and easy to read once you get used to it: IATA code (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IATA_airport_code) Cluster number (digits) 'r' (for "rack") \______ if meaningful for you Rack number / (ignore for EC2/GCP) 'm' (for "machine") Machine number An example hostname might be `dls1r56m10.mycompany-prod.com`. Alternatives that don't work as well: * Don't use a fixed-width field anywhere. Google used two-letter cluster names, and when those ran out they discovered that the two-letter assumption had worked its way into every layer of the stack. One of the important core services had `uint16_t cluster` in its wire protocol. * Don't make up your own cluster names. Don't use names like "northwest" or "east". IATA codes are your friend and you will love them because someone else already decided what they should be and wrote them down. * Don't use fields without delimiters. Being able to say "read digits until the next non-digit" is incredibly useful when writing ad-hoc parsers in shell scripts, because those parsers won't break when you bring up the first datacenter with more than 99 racks. If you tell people not to write hacky ad-hoc parsers in shell scripts, they will (1) do so anyway and (2) not tell you. * Don't leave off the cluster number. Yes, you only have one cluster in us-west-2 right now, but maybe in five years you'll need to have more than one because you want to run 30,000 EC2 instances there but all your per-cluster infrastructure software falls over at 20,000 instances. Then you can just turn up "pdx2" instead of trying to explain to Hashicorp engineers why you want to run the world's biggest Consul cluster. * Do not put the production hostnames under a subdomain of your corporate website. If you are ACME LLC then your hostnames should end with `.acme-prod.com` instead of `.prod.acme.com`. The same is true of corporate IT assets like laptops or workstations (`acme-corp.com` -- NEVER `.corp.acme.com`). Why? Browser cookies.

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tambre 3y ago
> IATA code (3 characters) What do you do if there's no airport?

mrfinn 3y ago

Coolest thing I did in the past about that was to name the servers of a start up in which I participated after the characters/places of "The Odyssey": Penelope, Telemaco, Itaca...

lelag 3y ago

For people that likes to stay in a given theme: I worked in a company that was using pokemon names for hostnames. Given there seem to be close to a thousand of them now, it's probably not such a bad idea for a small network where you don't expect more than a few hundreds host at a given time.

aconst 3y ago
Same thing where I currently work at :D It begun with skydiving location, as the guy in charge of PC administration is a diver, then he switched to pokemon as he figured out it was easier to take the next pokemon in the list. Considering we are only about 25 people at work, we have a long way to go before running out of names...

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__d 3y ago

There's a cattle vs pets argument here. When naming "pets", thematic names are nice: Tolkien characters, words-starting-with, deities, elements, plants, animals, etc. When naming "cattle", schemes that have fairly intricate coded meanings and numerical elements generate things like LDW21-0743 (London, Desktop, Windows, 2021, number 743). Somewhere between 50 and 100 machines and you need to transition, and it can be surprisingly traumatic.

amelius 3y ago
I named my pet after my neighbor.
- teddyh 3y ago
  Do you call your neighbor “Human Nigel”¹? 1. https://twitter.com/DawgBelly/status/862786851072909312 https://twitter.com/DawgBelly/status/862786851072909312
schwartzworld 3y ago
We have a greyhound, and they are closer to cattle than pets at the beginning of their lives. Each dog has a unique combination of numbers tattooed in their ears. Then they are named according to a weird convention where litter-mates share a "first name" while having their own unique "second name". For example, my greyhound was named Del Sol Madison, and she had litter mates with names like Del Sol Martin, Del Sol Maxine, etc. These names are used for identifying the dogs, but they are not trained to respond to them because they aren't pets. Once we got her, we called her Maddie and that's just been her name ever since.
- caseyohara 3y ago
  My family adopted a greyhound when I was a kid, was the sweetest dog. His track name was High Tech Kaddy Shack, we called him Kaddy.
kbob 3y ago
The RFC was written in 1990. Very few computers were cattle then.

neilv 3y ago

The first big Unix workstations site I worked at, at the same time as this RFC, the head sysadmin started naming SPARCstations after vacation destinations she liked (`cozumel`, `stcroix`, etc.). I guess it brightened up the all-gray cubicle farm. My hostname idea was to name network printers after trees (e.g., `pine`, `elm`). You can also make the hostname work with the FQDN. I once got the hostname `ilove.mit.edu`. I later got them to rename it to `ihavealovehaterelationshipwith.mit.edu`.

ncarroll 3y ago

I name for expected performance. A remote server named Arnie should be strong, reliable and always come back. A music server named Elvis serves music with elements from multiple genre and not mind being told what to do by someone who knows a lot less about how it does what it does (that'd be me) than it does. A back-up server named Methuselah should not die for a very, very, very long time. So far, it's been a successful scheme. Edited for missing words.

ineedasername 3y ago

In college our data systems ran various vaxen boxes, and there were few enough that they used planet names. Distinct, easy to remember, unlikely to clash with any other terminology. And had their needs grown beyond the 8 non-Earth planets (Earth wasn’t used, and Pluto was still a planet at the time) they could simply begin using the names of moons and other well know rocks flying about the solar system. In my own personal home setups I’ve followed the convention of choosing a from a religious pantheon the name of a god whose role most approximated— very loosely— whatever the system is going to be used for. I had a Hephaestus for a while that was a workhorse of a machine where I would work on special projects, etc.

jmbwell 3y ago

I would argue metadata does not belong in a device name. Location, OS, etc., should all be tracked in the device management system. The impulse to encode lots of metadata in a device name is reasonable, but less is more. Location, user, application, even OS can all change. What then does it mean for the device name? And how often do you need to distinguish between a laptop and a desktop, really? Name things uniquely, and as little beyond that as possible. If the system generates its own unique default (Windows) or manages its human-readable hostname on its own (Mac), use that. Let your device management tools tell you where it is, what model device it is, what OS it runs, etc., not to mention countless other things you’ll never fit in a name. I used to make exceptions for infrastructure, but with automated network management tools, I don’t even bother with that anymore. All that matters is that a device is represented in a database by a primary key, and I don’t even care what that is. The best naming convention is not to bother with conventions at all. Let the machines do that work.

SkipperCat 3y ago
We always had the location in the name. It really helps when you have multiple data centers. If a machine was to move from one data center to another, it would be renamed (or more probably rebuilt). Each DC had a different business usage, so knowing that immediately gave you context of what that machine should be doing. We also would also have the environment (prod or dev) in the name. It just gave you an immediate understanding of the sensitivity of the machine and therefore stopped/warned folks from doing crazy things in prod. Of course, YMMV, but I've always been a fan of names which give you context. Too much can be annoying but a little goes a long way.
- jmbwell 3y ago
  Sure. And I would add that application identifiers can be a different problem domain. `app-dev.houston-1.example.com` would be a perfectly reasonable name for an application, whether it resolves to a host or a load balancer or a CDN endpoint or whatever. The underlying machines I still don’t really care about; they will register their availability in the cluster or whatever automatically, or else they’ll get names like “db” and “web” in the docker-compose file, or what have you. But sure, where a human might reasonably need to enter a name for a resource in order to access it, a brief descriptive name makes sense.

jhwhite 3y ago

I used to work for a state gov entity, one of the counties I worked with named their servers after Looney Toon characters. I always thought that was cool and fun. Where I worked named the servers after the departments. /sigh. Such boring.

jodrellblank 3y ago

> "Some more suggestions are: mythical places (e.g., Midgard, Styx, Paradise), mythical people (e.g., Procne, Tereus, Zeus), killers (e.g., Cain, Burr, Boleyn), babies (e.g., colt, puppy, tadpole, elver), collectives (e.g., passel, plague, bevy, covey), elements (e.g., helium, argon, zinc)" Mildly recursively, when I play at trying to name all the elements[1] in fifteen minutes, I think of the sets of things elements are named after. Geographic places (Europium, Londinium, Americium, Californium), laboratories (Berkelium, Lawrencium), people (Einsteinium, Nobelium, Curium, Seaborgium), astronomical things (Helium, Selenium, Plutonium, Uranium, Mercurium), things known in the ancient world (Silver/Argentum, Lead/Plumbum)... although it's never enough for me to get all of them. [1] https://www.sporcle.com/games/g/elements https://www.sporcle.com/games/g/elements

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Boleyn a "killer" seems a bit of a stretch. I counter-propose "HenryVIII" to take her place.

lexicality 3y ago

I very much disagree with the Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine section. If you know a machine (especially a server!) is going to be used for one thing, name it after that thing. If you get a second one, you wipe both and rename them to thing-1 and thing-2. If you move a machine, you absolutely wipe it! "I named the new search server "gohan" because the original search server was called "goku" because he's searching for the dragon balls" is cute on the surface, but then you have to explain to everyone that joke and then they have to remember it. No one's going to be confused by "search-new-2021".

dale_glass 3y ago
That's from 1990, which is firmly from the "pet" era, not "cattle". Computers were scarce and expensive, virtualization wasn't a thing. Any random machine might turn out to do DHCP, FTP and payroll, just because the software had to go somewhere and that particular machine had the spare resources and was hooked up to the right network.
remram 3y ago
That's a terrible name. New things don't stay new, do you just wipe it and reinstall it as "old" when it's not so new anymore?
JohnFen 3y ago
> If you get a second one, you wipe both and rename them to thing-1 and thing-2. Am I the only one who finds it a pain in the butt to rename an existing machine? So many things have to be updated when I do that...
- lexicality 3y ago
  It's slightly easier if you treat it as if you have thrown that machine away and bought two new ones that you're setting up to replace the old one

cdelsolar 3y ago

My home computers are "themonolith" because it's a too-big rectangular prism that kinda looks like a monolith, and pi1 / pi2. Kind of uncreative and now I want to name them after something cooler.

SkipperCat 3y ago

When you only have a few computers to manage, have fun with names. But when you start to have hundreds (or thousands) of computers, you really need a naming convention. At that point, you're dealing with multiple environments, locations and business units. Being able to glean that information from a name is very helpful. Also, at that scale, names are never permanent. You're renaming (or rebuilding) hosts as they change location and usage. The worst is when you scale up from a small firm where all the hosts are named after movie characters and all services are hard coded to those names. Been there, its rough....

danaris 3y ago

For many years, I named my (personal) computers after fictional AIs—starting with the Marathon series, so the first two in this set were Durandal and Leela. More recently, I have been naming them after the cats in Diane Duane's Feline Wizards series (which begins with The Book of Night with Moon); however, having run through Rhiow, Saash, Urruah, and Arhu, I'm going to have to find a new naming scheme for my next one!

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vermilingua 3y ago

Culture Ship names [1] have served me well for many years now. I thought I’d have run out by now, but coming up with variations has extended the pool quite a bit. [1] https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft https://theculture.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_spacecraft

shrimp_emoji 3y ago
They're just so long though! :B `ssh foo@the-precise-nature-of-the-catastrophe`
Eric_WVGG 3y ago
Same :) but after a decade or so I decided to flip to “side characters from Adventure Time” (currently writing from Huntress Wizard, tethered to Rootbeer Guy)

nbk_2000 3y ago

In case anyone wants to see the Gary Larson illustration mentioned in the RFC: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2245214_Choosing_a_Name_for_your_Computer https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2245214_Choosing_a_...

sowbug 3y ago

unfair-wagon quiz-rocket lake-flag These seem to adhere to the guidelines. I have been using https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ for a while to name VMs. Generate 15 words, pick a pair that I can visualize, and I'm done.

davidblue 3y ago

Though I can't imagine this is going to be particularly constructive, I've spent a lifetime on the lookout for any opportunity to brag about the names I've given various hardware devices because they're quite funny. Perhaps - for end users/non-admins - it'd be best to point first to a list of "favorite" names?? Here are my favorites of mine, which have all notably performed the function of a unique system name quite admirably: - Gravel (iPhone 8 Plus) - Jorts (iPhone 12 Pro Max) - Hildur (Desktop PC) - [Kudzu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu) (iPad Pro) - Winterkorn (Wireless OBD2 Scanner)

JohnFen 3y ago

For naming all the machines on my home network, I go with the theme of "kinds knives or blades". I like the symbolism (knives are symbolic of logical thought). The only problem is that I have a lot of machines, and am running out of names!

tacitusarc 3y ago
My fiancé runs a knife factory. There are so many names. Perhaps you just need to embrace some of the more descriptive names! “Folding Hunter Knife - Nickel Silver Drop Point”
- JohnFen 3y ago
  That would be one way! But I also want the names to be relatively short and contain no spaces or non-alphanumeric characters, because I type them in a lot. I still have 20 or so left on my "future names" list. I'm now into names of knife types in the African continent.

darkstar999 3y ago

I don’t know much about RFCs. It’s amusing to see this doc cut into “pages”. I wonder if there’s a meta-RFC proposing that this was no longer needed.

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icepat 3y ago

I have for a while, and will for the foreseeable future, name my computers `terminal`. It started as a joke, but has turned into a habit. Every device I own is named that, with the exception of my cellphone, which is named `phone`.

riffic 3y ago

it's probably a good idea to put "RFC 1178" in the title.

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LinuxBender 3y ago

I intentionally violate this RFC for workstations and laptops. Some applications leak client hostnames to remote servers. I prefer to keep it bland. For public servers I would say I am in alignment and would only add I keep server names and domain names programmatic, short and simple enough for anyone inebriated to type. It's worked out well thus far. uname -n localhost

theandrewbailey 3y ago

Some of my machines are references to LoadingReadyRun's Installation Anxiety[0][1] sketch. When I was in college ~15 years ago, I built a file server, so I named it toilet. I eventually put a web server on it too, and when I replaced the hardware, I named it gram, but my blog code still retains the old name[2]. And yes, I named my router dishwasher. I'm dead set against IoT, so naming my computers after fixtures or appliances hasn't caused conflicts. [0] https://wiki.loadingreadyrun.com/index.php/Installation_Anxiety https://wiki.loadingreadyrun.com/index.php/Installation_Anxi... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajW2fDy41fY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajW2fDy41fY [2] https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet https://github.com/theandrewbailey/toilet

dfxm12 3y ago

If I need to name a personal computer, I will name it after a famous computer, like DeepThought.

miroljub 3y ago

I use porn star names to name computers in my company network. It's easy to claim that "lisaann" and "peternorth" are just randomly invented names, and then watch some corporate drone blushing and struggling when asked to explain why they find those names inappropriate.

fknorangesite 3y ago
Yikes.
urda 3y ago
Big yikes, that's a hostile work environment and is a huge risk for your HR I am sure. I would not be comfortable working with such conditions, and would be sure to let my HR rep know.
- danwee 3y ago
  Perhaps I missed the irony. But why do you think that is hostile?
  - tom_ 3y ago
    I suspect you'd just disagree or fail to understand if it were explained. Safest to just trust the implied advice in this instance!
    - stouset 3y ago
      “We’ll I don’t find it inappropriate so it’s completely impossible for me to bother trying to understand why someone else might.”
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - GMoromisato 3y ago
    Most porn objectifies women and many employees are women who do not like being objectified. Perhaps I missed the irony.

DonHopkins 3y ago

I stuffed the RFC into GPT and asked for a summary, and asked it to write 10 examples of each point. It "hallucinated" an interesting elaboration of the "use real words" rule that wasn't mentioned in the RFC: >Use real words: >- Unreal words: Zibber, Quibbit, Wuzzo, Brumple, Kwozzle, Gliggern, Drimble, Fopple, Zinkern, Thribble >- Real words: Pulsar, Fusion, Vector, Quantum, Catalyst, Dynamo, Nexus, Zephyr, Vortex, Phoenix So I asked it, "Give me a list of 100 silly unreal words that are good computer names." And it generated a hilarious list of silly unreal words for computer names that obeyed all the other rules too. >Blibber Flibbit Zoggly Snarfle Quizzix Jibberix Flumble Snootle Jumblex Skrungle Flibberish Squozzle Buzzlequib Zumblequack Skrizzik Glibbergen Squibble Wibbleshack Zibberflap Quabblefudge Kwozzler Skrubble Jibberlump Squibbleton Quacklebum Wuzzlequorp Flibberquill Zibberplush Quozzletuck Grubblefrush Jumblezor Squigglemuff Quabbleblurt Buzzlekringle Skrubblefrimp Blibbertron Glibberspark Wuzzlethrump Flibblecrust Zibberklax Quozzlegruff Flumblezest Jibberclump Squibblethorp Skrungleblast Zumblequax Grubbleflink Flibbersprout Buzzlegrit Quacklepuff Blibberchomp Snootleburst Glibberzilch Squozzleflop Kwozzlespork Skrubblemunch Zumblethrift Quozzlequench Flibblegrit Jibberplank Squibblezorb Quacklethrift Flumblezax Wuzzlesplat Glibberfluff Blibbersketch Zibberfrizzle Squozzleblimp Grubblequark Buzzlekrunch Skrunglefluff Zumblecrunch Quozzlefrump Flibbersquatch Jibberflit Squibblekrush Blibberblitz Wuzzleflank Skrubblespook Zumblekrunk Quackleflunk Grubblesmirk Squozzlefrimp Buzzleplunk Flibblezorp Glibberplush Jibberclank Squibblesmudge Blibbergrit Zibberzorch Wuzzlequench Kwozzlesplurge Skrunglethrift Flumbleblimp Quozzlesmirk Buzzlefluff Grubblethwack Zumblegrit Quackleblurt Squibbleplush They seemed to have certain patterns to them, so I asked: "Describe in words the linguistic and other techniques you used to come up with that list of silly words." >Sure, the process of generating a list of silly, unreal words involves several linguistic and creative techniques: >Phonotactics: Phonotactics is the study of the rules governing the possible phoneme sequences in a language. In creating these words, I adhered to the phonotactic rules of English, ensuring that the combinations of sounds were plausible for English speakers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics >Phonaesthetics: This is the study of the inherent pleasantness (euphony) or unpleasantness (cacophony) of the sound of certain words, phrases, and sentences. To come up with silly words, I chose combinations that are typically associated with a humorous or whimsical sound in English. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonaesthetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonaesthetics >Combining Familiar Sounds: To create these unreal words, I combined familiar sounds and syllables from English in new and unusual ways. This increases the chances that the words will be pronounceable and memorable, while still being novel and silly. >Consonant-Vowel Structure: Most of the words follow a basic consonant-vowel structure, which is common in English and makes the words easier to pronounce. >Morpheme Mixing: Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units of language. In English, we can combine morphemes in different ways to create new words. In this case, I combined various nonsensical morphemes to create new, unreal words. >Influence of Existing Words: Some of the created words might resemble or remind you of existing words in English. This was intentional as these associations can make the words sound more familiar and easier to remember, while still being clearly unreal. >Humorous Connotations: Many of these words were designed to have humorous or whimsical connotations. This was achieved by choosing sounds and syllable combinations that are often associated with humor, silliness, or absurdity in English. >Variety: In creating this list, I sought to ensure a wide variety of sounds, syllable counts, and levels of complexity. This increases the overall silliness of the list and ensures that there are words that will appeal to different tastes. >Remember, though, that creating silly, unreal words is a highly creative process and there are no hard-and-fast rules. The most important thing is to have fun with it and create words that make you smile! I've never heard of Phonaesthetics or Phonaesthetics (but they sound plausible and pleasant ;) ), so I asked: "To elaborate about Phonaesthetics and Phonaesthetics, give me as many explicit examples of possible of how those techniques apply to the list of computer names you generated above." >Sure, here's how the principles of phonotactics and phonaesthetics apply to some of the silly, unreal words I created as potential computer names: >Phonotactics: >"Brungle": This word adheres to English phonotactic rules, in which a single consonant or consonant cluster ("br") can be followed by a vowel ("u"), and then ending in a consonant or consonant cluster ("ngle"). >"Fribzoot": Again, "fribzoot" starts with a valid English consonant cluster ("fr"), followed by a short vowel ("i"), another consonant cluster ("bz"), a vowel ("oo"), and ends with a consonant ("t"). >"Blupzark": This word adheres to the English phonotactic rules with a valid consonant cluster ("bl") followed by a short vowel ("u"), a consonant ("p"), another consonant cluster ("z"), a vowel ("a"), and ending with a consonant ("rk"). >"Tringwop": Here, "tr" is a common consonant cluster, followed by a short vowel ("i"), a consonant cluster ("ng"), a vowel ("o"), and a final consonant ("p"). Each part of the word is a permissible combination in English. >Phonaesthetics: >"Snorkwib": This word has a whimsical sound to it, due to the combination of the "sn" sound at the beginning, often associated with words like "snicker" and "sneak", and the "wib" at the end, which is an uncommon but still pronounceable combination in English. >"Quibnorf": The use of "qu" at the beginning adds a quirky, whimsical sound, while the ending "-norf" adds to the absurdity, reminding one of words like "dwarf". >"Glibfraz": The "glib-" prefix may remind us of the word "glib", giving a sense of smooth, quick wit. The "-fraz" suffix has a zany, fun feel to it. >"Plonkstir": The beginning, "plonk", may bring to mind the English onomatopoeic word 'plonk', giving a playful, silly feel. The ending "-stir" balances it with a more usual word ending. >Phonotactic rules ensure that the created words are plausible and pronounceable to English speakers, even though they are entirely made up. Phonaesthetics, on the other hand, contributes to the silliness, whimsy, and overall appeal of the words, making them suitable and memorable as computer names. >Please note that while these linguistic principles can guide the process, the creation of such words also involves a considerable degree of creativity and intuition. These techniques are also useful for generating memorable nice sounding company and product names, too!

at_a_remove 3y ago

For my private network, I used The Black Company for characters. Logging on CROAKER. Primary Domain Controller would be DOMIN8R; Backup Domain Controller is THELADY. Heavy wizardry on ONEEYE or GOBLIN. Various servers got CATCHER, SHIFTER, LIMPER, and the like.

Macha 3y ago

I've had the same naming scheme for my personal devices for about 15 years now. The word list is from a show I was watching at the time. Workstations are protagonists, servers are antagonists, mobile devices are child characters. Last year I finally exhausted names from the first show and added a second one to my name list. Is it more logical to name them things like phone-2023-1 and cloud-server-5 - sure. But the reality is my personal infrastructure is going to max out at like 40 concurrent devices, and that's including stuff like network devices which does get more "practical" names (like office-ap-1, tv-switch-1) since I rarely ssh into them. So may as well have a little fun with naming

farnerup 3y ago

The best theme is to use brands of scotch.

forinti 3y ago
A friend of mine used liquor names and put the corresponding bottle on top of each machine.

aftbit 3y ago

My personal laptops, workstations, and servers (all pets of course) have the following names, in no particular order: tron, finch, wintermute, sparrowhawk, axolotl, rook, moneta, mengpo, odessa, ithaca, turing, lovelace

linker3000 3y ago
I had a small DC at work that included Turing and Lovelace, plus: Wilkes, Babbage amd Hopper.
- vincent-manis 3y ago
  My home wifi SSID is Marsnet, and my machines are all named after Martian surface features. So there's olympus and pavonis, arcadia and xanthe, and so on. I'm typing this on syrtis-major. I'm hoping not to run out of surface features.

jdblair 3y ago

Computers as pets!

yazantapuz 3y ago

I use macross characters' names to baptize my computers.

aidenn0 3y ago
At home, I use characters from the first anime I watched as a digisub concurrent with it airing in Japan. It had considerably more female characters than male, so I use the male names for printers.

freedude 3y ago

I strive for a list of names that are shorter than 6 characters each. Usually it will follow a theme. In 20+ years of IT I have set up a couple of networks of systems. Some past themes... Characters of the current book series I am reading. Hunger Games, Star Wars, Star Trek, C. S. Lewis Novels, Tolkien Novels, Louis L'Amour Novels Trees, plants, flowers, etc... Clouds Snakes, birds, etc... The important thing is to be unique, memorable and thwart the 'cattle' people.

srvmshr 3y ago

I named all my computers and VMs after sword or sword namesakes e g. Katana, Excalibur, Scimitar etc. All my versioning names also follow some popular project's version names e.g. x86 & amd64 internal designations or codenames. Similarly, for smaller versioning tasks I have used Fedora Project's release names. I just do it to learn something along the way as well. It just gives the different entities I work on a personalized touch.

sokoloff 3y ago

I used to carefully name all of our computers. Starting a few years ago, I stopped even knowing the names of most of the physical machines on my home network. Sure, I'd have to go to the DHCP reservations list to figure out the name of my kids' computers to remote into them. The VMs and containers on my proxmox server are all named after the service and a trailing number. Plex is plex1, file servers are fs#, unifi controller is unifi1, etc. Once having a VM or container became essentially free, it mostly eliminated the need to think up or remember names.

justinlloyd 3y ago

The RFC is for a different time and place. Though some of the principles still stand and I have deployed/used many of them, but not all are applicable. I'm not saying my scheme is perfect, or even very good, but it works for my needs and I've used the following convention for around 30+ years. I've got two schemes, one for small sites/personal installations, and one for big sites. w for workstations. t for tables. p for printers. c for cameras. a for access points. s for servers. m for mobiles/cellphones. v for vms. i for iot devices. u for "devices we don't know how to designate." x for sensors, e.g water leak sensor, package delivery box sensor. Obviously if you only have three devices in your entire home, it doesn't really make sense to have a "naming scheme." For personal installations and small sites (not an exhaustive list): a-studio-ap6 (access point in studio) a-catbathroom-ap6pro (access point in cats' bathroom) a-workshop-ap6 (access point in the workshop) a-rv-aplr (access point in the rv) w-lloyd-vr (workstation, household VR/gaming computer) w-justin-storm (workstation, storm is the CPU case manufacturer) l-justin-surfacebook2 (my surface laptop) l-joyce-surfacebook2 (wife's surface laptop) l-joyce-surfacestudio (wife's surface laptop) l-justin-mbp2013 (my old macbook) p-office-hp3600 (office printer) p-workshop-konica (konica minolta printer in workshop) p-office-canon (office printer) v-justin-ubuntu (virtualized linux) v-justin-arch (virtualized linux) v-justin-win10 (virtualized linux) t-lloyd-weather (samsung table for weather) t-lloyd-ipad00 t-lloyd-ipad01 c-lloyd-frontdoor (camera at front door) c-lloyd-garagedoor (camera on outside of garage door) c-lloyd-garageceiling (camera on the garage ceiling) s-lloyd-main (main home server) s-lloyd-backup (backup server) s-lloyd-storage (backup server at the storage locker) s-lloyd-cloud (our racked server in some midwest datacenter) s-lloyd-rv (server in the rv) m-joyce-pixel6 (wife's cellphone) m-justin-pixelpro7 (cellphone belonging to me) m-justin-note20 (cellphone belonging to me) m-justin-iphone13 (cellphone belonging to me) The local machine is given the name, though some cannot be easily renamed, or they have a restriction such as NETBIOS name length, and then the MAC is also set with a name on the router too, so magic packets and other tools know what the device is named even if the device is not broadcasting any name. It helps with identifying mystery devices on the network, and who owns the device. I apply the same principle to naming cats and people. "grey-cat", "black-cat", "fuzzy-black-cat", "pink-human", "mao" (cat), "cat", "cath" (also cat), "orange-cat", "chat" (also cat), "gatto" (cat). For large sites with dozens or hundreds of servers or multiple sites/data centers: IATA codes with rack and machine name and absolutely nothing creative, and clear separators between each part. e.g. lax-r01-s17. And then I make sure that any publicly accessible machines sit on their own "prod" domain separate from the company's main domain, e.g. hn-prod.com, or bigcorp-prod.com

ta8903 3y ago

I remember a site that had a long list of themed names sorted by the number of elements in a set. Eg. 7 colours of a rainbow, 8 planets, etc. I lost it and can't for the life of me remember what it was called. Anyone have an idea?

dang 3y ago

Related: RFC 1178: Choosing a Name for Your Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35424550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35424550 - April 2023 (3 comments) RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054014 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26054014 - Feb 2021 (121 comments) Choosing a Name for Your Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26027247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26027247 - Feb 2021 (1 comment) RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741009 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16741009 - April 2018 (173 comments) Choosing a name for your computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5167998 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5167998 - Feb 2013 (10 comments) Choosing names for your computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290106 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290106 - April 2010 (86 comments) Choosing a Name for Your Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110017 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110017 - Feb 2008 (9 comments)

thom 3y ago

Ah, I remember the day we retired the last machine named after a forest in Magic: the Gathering and shredded its soul into a thousand pieces, each of which adhered to one AWS service or another. I still feel guilty. Especially when the bill arrives each month.

marymkearney 3y ago

Do named computers also develop traits or personalities? Fragile | sturdy, balky | cooperative, high-maintenance | easygoing, spiteful | nice, etc.? Like, "oh, there goes Icarus again, it's always been contrary."

rbanffy 3y ago

After trying to convince the Ubuntu petname package maintainer to make the source-code PEP-8 compliant, I went on to build a JavaScript clone based on the spy tools listed in the Vault-7 leak. I called it `nsaname`. It's much more limited in possible combinations than petname, but it's perfect for naming secret projects. You can install it with `npm install nsaname`.

michaelteter 3y ago

This brings back great and terrible memories. There were so many arguments between otherwise reasonable people over server names. Some went for cute, some for mythology, some planetary (which can be quite limiting if you stick with only the home solar system), and finally my favorite - the purpose-based, numerically suffixed.

gglitch 3y ago

Written by Expect's own Don Libes :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Libes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Libes

gajon 3y ago

My computers and server are named: endgame, vortex, breakpoint, lucretia, hangar18, shewolf Megadeth song names.

euroderf 3y ago

What, no mention here of Japanese movie monsters ? It is a fine sysadmin tradition. godzilla and then the entire gallery of mutant rogues.

clnq 3y ago

Everyone here is talking about creative machine naming schemes, but almost every org in the world names machines with random strings, like what Windows OOBE generates by default. Sometimes the names are pre-OOBEd with scripts that generate images for new machines, but they are still mostly random. I have never seen a creative machine name in an academic or business setting. It's interesting how different HN is from most orgs. Honestly, even most home machines are randomly named, I think.

dmurray 3y ago
My 2000-person employer (in finance!) names desktop machines with dictionary words and a short seemingly random suffix. So you could be GIRAFFE84F, there won't typically be other giraffes. Servers get names that are concatenations of meaningful abbreviations that are meaningless to an outsider, you might be on nycfithro603. Actually I can't think of any org I've worked for that had random strings for its physical machines. Cloud VMs, yes (though not always).
- clnq 3y ago
  My experience is completely different. Having worked in companies between 15 and 15k employees, I've never seen anything other than random strings. A while ago I wrote a script that uses GPT to generate some machine names and then check them for collisions with existing ones. So no suffixes needed. I thought I was innovating, hahaha. Very interesting.

killjoywashere 3y ago

for personal computers, I go for an uncommon four-letter. No curse words though.

omoikane 3y ago

Related: https://xkcd.com/910/ https://xkcd.com/910/

smcameron 3y ago

I once named a server hosting an RCS repo "fire", so that when someone asked about the source code I could reply, "It's on fire."

Dig1t 3y ago

>Words like "moron" or "twit" are good names if no one else is going to see them. But if you ever give someone a demo on your machine, you may find that they are distracted by seeing a nasty word on your screen. (Maybe their spouse called them that this morning.) Why bother taking the chance that they will be turned off by something completely irrelevant to your demo. I see their point, but I’m going to consciously ignore this advice because it makes my life more interesting.

rootbear 3y ago

A friend who worked at PARC in the 80s said they had printers named for snakes, such as copperhead, rattler, etc. The sales guy named his "trouser"...

roydivision 3y ago

Back in the day I worked for a small IT company that hadn't yet implemented DNS or DHCP, all machines including office PCs were named using periodically distributed hosts files. Reading this file was fun, to see the imagination slowly dwindle. The names started using the usual themes, planets, gases, Tolkien characters. By the end the names had degenerated into 'door', 'window', 'chair', 'pen'.

mcv 3y ago

I remember once coming across my-hostname-is-longer-than-yours.mit.edu. My university used ship types as names for their machines. Workstations (of which there were many) had a short 3-letter ship type followed by two digits. That worked very well. Privately I use fantasy/Science Fiction worlds. One of the first was discworld (it had a very large harddisk), and I stuck with it. I've had beleriand, dagobah, tatooine, and my most recently ferrix. Okay, mostly Star Wars planets, I guess.

mattpallissard 3y ago

For several years I've been using the naming conventions to drive configuration management and other tools. Ditched rack and DC identifiers years ago because. 1. Usually not a concern. 2. When it is, it's in ipam/dcim. Plus you can usually tell from ip address. A simple format is: app-specific-general-tierNN. foo-mysql-db-p01, foo-nginx-web-p01 Then data is nested in a hierarchy using hiera, saltstack, or custom merge behavior in cdktf. Since the names are most specific to least specific it's easy to apply configuration for each section, letting the most specific configuration override on merge. Easiest way to automate some of the annoying bare metal/vm requirements without bringing in or writing additional tools. You rack it, set the hostname in the idrac, then let dhcp and provisioning tools do their thing.

dbtonez 3y ago

for the company computers we do COMPANY ABBREVIATION-DEPARTMENT#number(-LT if mobile workstation). has worked out nicely so far but we are a small operation. for home, i use Iron Man characters. I like to name my main gaming PC as villains, like Iron Monger. I am a HUGE Spider-Man fan, but I admit I don't think it is as cool to see Doc Ock or Kraven as opposed to... War Machine... light up on the network. *edit - Monger not Mongrel

kjs3 3y ago

I have always had something on my personal network called 'kremvax' since the '80s. Now, it's back to being the name of an actual VAX. You had to be there...