Choosing a Name for Your Computer | Hacker News Reader

Choosing a Name for Your Computer

faqs.org

22 pointsnickb9 comments

From the article: "Don't overload other terms already in common use."

I heard that Nokia named a set of meeting rooms after cities. This was changed after it cost a small fortune in cancelled flights.

From the article: "Avoid alternate spellings."

An ex-colleague named servers after his favourite punk and metal bands, many of which have unusual spellings. Furthermore, it doesn't give the right impression if you name your mail server megadeth

> I heard that Nokia named a set of meeting rooms after cities. This was changed after it cost a small fortune in canceled flights.

Funny. Has anyone covered it in an article or something? Would love to hear more...

Google conference rooms are (or at least were) named after cities as well.

I wish my current job had a similar naming scheme so I can have an excuse to escape the current Chicago weather ("you mean I wasn't supposed to fly to Hawaii? oh, well...")

Many of the offices I've worked in have named meeting rooms after cities. But there was never any confusion -- I guess when you say "the meeting's in Milan in 5 minutes" there isn't any ambiguity.

(I did try to get out of a few meetings in that room by claiming I was too sexy for it. Never worked.)

The nerdiest scheme I encountered was naming machines after elements, and matching the last part their IPs with the atomic number of the element in question.

For some years now I name my computers after famous scientists/inventors (in the broad sense of these words)

I.e.: galileo, newton, leibnitz, curie, marconi...

Be careful not to choose sets of names which are too common though. Trying to integrate two separate systems, each of which was named after the Greek pantheon, can be very painful.

Home network:

Airports - Tonto, Robin, and Pokey.

Computers - Lone Ranger, Batman, and Gumbi.

When I worked at Cornell, we had a habit of naming pairs or groups of machines that were related (eg. as failovers, or multimasters, or whatever) so that the grouping was obvious enough to stick. Hack/slash, itchy/scratchy, homer/bart/marge, etc. My officemate and I had Indigo2's named squish and squash, for example.

I've done the same thing ever since, and if you look at truly huge deployments, you end up developing a lexicon that exists solely to indicate where and what a machine is. eg. "what's wrong with pyj121-200? the whole rack is flapping!" "oh it looks like a bad blade in pyextbr2" "well open a ticket to swap the blade tonight then! it's hanging index transfers!" Datacenter, rack, machine. Simple.

Meanwhile, at some of the smaller deployments I've done, there are machines named after porn stars (lovelace/holmes were a couple of onsite/offsite RAID monstrosities; bildo/remsen were hot and cold firewall nodes), musicians (mingus/parker/coltrane/monk), and so on. Functional or physical relationships as indicated by lexical relationships are a relatively convenient shorthand, and if one machine turns into a farm, you have lovelace1, lovelace2, lovelace3...

Just some musings. Thank god I don't work ops anymore.

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