this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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I've ended up with a number of machines on my network, and a need to name them all in a somewhat logical way. For several years I had them named after the planets, which worked well until the PCs for myself, my girlfriend, servers and Raspberry Pi's quickly summed up to more than the eight planets. I've broadened it somewhat to include any Greek/Roman mythological figure, but the system is definitely not as clean as it used to be.

Do you have a coordinated naming theme for your machines?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

The names of people I know, but changed a bit to sound more cartoonish.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

My unraid server is called Mothership. Everything else is called what it is because I'll get confused if they had cute names

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Games from my childhood. Moon Patrol, Galaga, Zaxxon, Twin Bee, Xevious, Gradius, etc.

Yup. I'm that old.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I use names of random yokai. There are so many that I'll never run out. I used to use names of fictional AIs that I would hand pick, but after a bunch of VMs, that became too annoying to deal with.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Same! Every time I deploy a new machine I look a the list of characters and pick one. It's been serving me well for over 15 years now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

US states. If I have more than 50 different host names to manage, I should re-evaluate my hobbies. And then lazily move on to US state capitals.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I have a weird one: years ago I called one machine "nudl" (like using one's noodle but with a weird spelling). Now I've got a few different nudls, a strudl, a dudl, and I think there's a pudl in the closet somewhere.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

On my labs cluster they are named after famous physicists

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

At my first job/internship it was fish names (they were dev/qa servers so wiped almost daily): Crappie, Bluegill, Walleye, Marlin, etc.

Current job is medical so it's all professional (i.e gr01sec02, gr02sccm01)

At home I've got a couple of naming schemes for different device types.:

Phones: i-telleuwat(last 4 of the number)
PCs and Media centers: playon(last octet of the IP)
Servers:gimme(service thats hosted)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I recently switched to using the periodic table. I made myself a nice little spreadsheet to keep track of it all. I used to name hosts after random stuff like cereal, snacks, or just plain old [my first name]-desktop.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

cakes then a different type of cake. ie cakesFlan

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Bird species, most of the time. I look for a bird that seems to have some connection with the intended purpose of the box, then use that. e.g. my work computer's hostname is cormorant.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Domestic no Kanojo is an anime that people describe as rubbish. Maybe it is, depending on where you're coming from, but I was invested in it, and so decided to honour the anime/manga by naming my servers "Hina Tachibana", "Natsuo Fujii", "Rui Tachibana" and "Miu Ashihara".

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

My Raspberry Pi's are named after planets and large bodies on the Solar system.

My servers are named after The Expanse characters and ships.

VM's and CT's after their usage with a tag in Proxmox for the OS used.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've been doing birds. So far I just have Cardinal, Bluebird, and Sparrow

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Started with Evangelion Magi naming and now I just use the pet name generator in Terraform.

Random_pet

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I give them weird syntax names so if someone was to hack in the names wouldn't give away what they are immediately. I don't reuse numbers so that if I rebuild something it gets a new num.

Location-Ordinal-NetworkNum-Counter Eg AU-01-01-01

Containers are just their application name except where I have more than 1 then its Application01,02,etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I do Reboot characters, since I'm old! Kind of running low now but I call each of my phones Glitch and it makes me very happy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Lowercaps Dwarfplanets. chaos, orcus, ixion, ceres, haumea, makemake, etc. DHCP/router is named sol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

WoW places. Since some of my servers died, I'm currently only sitting on dark portal (Firewall), and the Stranglethorn Valley server with Gurubashi Arena (Plex), Booty Bay (you can imagine) and wild shore (shared file system VM)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I use Roman authors, with the machine/VM's purpose (often vaguely) linked to what the author was known for. For example, my NAS is called Tacitus (a historian), while my game server is called Plautus (a playwright). A couple services predate my schema (like my Pihole and OPNSense box) and are named descriptively.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Pretty much same as you: If it works for NASA or it's a heavenly body, it works for me. Main PC is called SATURN V (SATURN for most things). Laptop is called HYPERION. Currently saving up to replace SATURN with ARTEMIS. Might throw in a GAIA NAS/virtualization server at some point, if cash flow allows for it. I'm not as picky about my family's devices that I've set up, though... They'll keep their randomly generated names, mostly out of laziness.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Names of Greek letters.

Alpha, Beta, Delta, Epsilon...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Star types, stellar objects, planet names, etc...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I’ve used Star Trek names before, but in general I’ve just started naming them what they’re used for (ex. Dev-Mint, StorageCore)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I use the names of chemical elements, but with two twists: I assign them in the order in which they appear in the song "The Elements" by Tom Lehrer, and I use the German names. So I have (or had), among others, Wasserstoff, Sauerstoff, Stickstoff, etc ...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Star Trek ships at home. And Game of Thrones characters at work.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I name devices after Greek Gods / Goddesses. My main server is called Olympus.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Same Greek or Roman gods and mythical creatures. loki, hades, medusa, cerberus

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Ship names from the expanse.

My PC is the Rocinante My home server was previously the Behemoth, put it in a smaller case so now it’s Medina.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I don't have a very consistent naming theme. I've used various names related to music, science, and art. I have a decomissioned machine named "numbers" for example.

However, I would like to point out we have plenty more than 8 celestial bodies of interest in the solar system if you include Eris, Ceres, Pluto, Makemake, the moons of Jupiter, and more. It might not be indefinitely extendable, but may help in the short term.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I've never thought about this, but now that you bring it to my attention I think I'd go with a combination of mineral-flower, so for example "tourmaline-calendula".
Also to automate that, I saw that there is this neat website perchance.org that you can use to construct random word generators, I'm wondering if there's an open source alternative though, that would be great

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Scientists/inventors for me - bonus points if I can find one related to the machine's purpose (Kodi machine named after a contributor to the TV for example)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

"People" names that are alliterative with the actual machine type. E.g. PeterPi, WillWhitebox, NancyNAS, LarryLePotato

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Russian spacecraft and rockets.

Currently I have N1 as my home server and my desktop is Energia. I've previously had Proton and Soyuz etc.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

All of my servers are named after characters from the Dragon Ball universe.

Don't recommend doing an 'obscured' naming scheme,, hate having to refer to a spreadsheet to know what server does what because I tend to spin up a lot of random stuff. Highly recommend using functional names that are easy for your brain to remember, like an acronym for whatever service or types of services it's running.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Just stupid puns that come to mind when I set it up. Synology NAS is "Rainy" since the box had "be your own cloud" written on it. M1 MacBook is "Apple Pie" because being ARM it's just a big Raspberry Pi right? Etc

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I name all my computers after NZ Birds in our native language Māori. So far I have used, Pukeko, Takahe, Kakapo, Weka, Ruru, Piwakawaka and my latest laptop Kahu

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Fun fact: When AOL was still operating in Germany, internal servers in their network were named after characters / things from Asterix comics, like Asterix, Obelix, Idefix, Miraculix and even Hinkelstein (menhir). When Telecom Italia bought them up they unfortunately got rid of all these and replaced them with standard corpo server names. Source: I worked there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I used to work in the GRASP lab at Penn, and my predecessor there was John Bradley of xv fame. He had started naming all the machines after fish.

When I got there I continued the practice, naming some tiny computers being used for mini robots after different types of goldfish.

In my current job, years ago, I managed a group of Linux servers, and I named them after Demons (Lucifer, Asmodeus, Azrael, Beelzebub, etc.).

At this point, there is a specific naming convention in use where I'm at, and the name is limited to identifying organization, application, and server type.

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