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Choosing names for your computers

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77 pointss-phi-nl86 comments

A nice naming scheme (for server names) I read about somewhere suggested following the periodic table. Element names can be used as the server names and corresponding element numbers as corresponding IP addresses (subnet suffix) of the servers.

That's as good an excuse as any to post the Periodic Table on the wall.

There are other advantages to this naming scheme. Element abbreviations can be used as short DNS names. For example, both lithium and li could resolve to 192.168.1.3.

Also, groups of elements can correspond to types of computers. Halogens can be embedded devices, noble gasses can be gaming machines, alkali metals can be file servers, etc.

I'd use radioactive elements for Windows servers.

Also, hydrogen - firewall/GW, oxygen - mail server, carbon - public web server, iron - source repository.

While looking at the serverfault thread linked somewhere in this post, I found the following site: http://www.namingschemes.com/

It's a whole wiki full of naming schemes. It actually included the one I am using (Battlestar Galactica callsigns), which I though should have been pretty unique.

BSG callsigns, cool - I've been naming my machines after 80's transformers for years!

i have two machines on a similar theme the first is called battlestar. and the other is galactica. my backup box is called medic.

I heard of one organization that used disasters. Titanic, Hindenburg, Ishtar... the nice part is that you keep getting new ones all the time.

I'd probably avoid Eyjafjallajokull, though.

Especially since the technically correct spelling is Eyjafjallajökull. :-)

In IDN that's xn--eyjafjallajkull-jtb, quite the server name.

My first naming scheme revolved around monkeys, I had spacemonkey, funkymonkey and.. I forget the third. That one didn't scale well.

For a short while I used characters from children's books (mom is a librarian who loves children's books), this included lafcadio, lorax and grinch.

Right now it's robots from Futurama. Bender, flexo (the Win XP dual-boot of bender, which is OSX), clamps, roberto (the crazy, stabbing robot), calculon and my dedicated server, robot-devil.

Not that anyone asked, but hey, naming schemes are fun!

Hah, so I'm not the only one to go the Futurama robots route. My personal fave is Boxy (Is he objecting or backing up? I can't tell!)

Good name for a Boxee box.

Finally, a use for Google Sets: http://labs.google.com/sets

I've never seen that before. When I was in college, I named all my machines after songs by Orbital. This worked pretty well since they were, back then, cranking out a new album every couple of years or so. I added chime, midnight, and halcyon to Google Sets to see what it would come up with and every other suggestion on its list was the name of an Orbital song. Nice.

Only time I remember having interesting computer names out side of college, the companies lawyers put a squash to it. Infectious diseases just has so much creativity to it.

I suspect they were ok with "cholera", but someone in the legal department got upset with "ebola". I think the rest had been disabled by that point, and I'm sure they were already off the internal dns.

My naming convention is naming conventions. My server is named slogan, my tablet is named color, my netbook is named protagonist, my car (a Nissan Quest) is named Tribe, my ad-hoc wireless network's ssid is synonym, my external drive is named planet, and my server's replacement will be named category.

Previous article and lively conversation on this subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834817

Classic. I have a naming scheme for my personal laptops--female characters from sci fi series. I've had an aluminum PowerBook named Kira, a black MacBook named Dee, and an aluminum MacBook named Kara so far.

My current naming theme is Song Of Ice And Fire characters. The netbook I'm writing this in is named Tyrion, for example.

My boss is the sysadmin for my school's CS department; there is an IT department that every other department uses, but they're slow and useless.

For the longest time, their servers were named after ships, such as Bismark, Arizona, Enterprise, etc, while all of our servers were named after things that sink ships, such as Broadside, Salvo, Crash, Leak, etc.

Fittingly, we name our servers after universities. Ivy League colleges are web-facing, the Pac-10 are database servers, and the Claremont colleges are dev boxes. Ultimately no scheme will hold up, but at least we have a few thousand pre-made names to use.

I name our servers after the asset tag numbers. DNS can then be used to provide an inventory of our data centers. It also ensures we have a programatic and automatic way to name machines, and numbers are remarkably memorable after a while.

Any scheme based on a pool of names does not scale. If you have big plans, a sequence is the way to go.

There are lots of pools you could use that offer a vast amount of names, assuring that you never run out even if you have a very large number of hosts. Good examples in my opinion are names of things existing in real life, e.g. band names, names of famous (CS) people, ..., while fictional names (characters from some book) tend to run out too soon.

You could even partition hostnames, e.g. all workstations in room 1 are named after famous rock stars, all workstation in room 2 are named after famouse rappers, etc.

I get that there isn't a serious argument here, but how do you reconcile when the guy using 'megadeth' moves to a different cubicle?

For my personal systems, I choose names of demons (since they run lots of dæmons). I get a little thrill out of not knowing what to name something, and taking it as an excuse to go look up cool names.

I'm quite fond of using typefaces -- you can be surprisingly descriptive:

Arial (laptop), Futura (internet tablet), Minion (home server), Courier (router), Perpetua (VPS), etc.

Don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names.

Oops. My work computer is Spaz, my iPhone is Dirty Sanchez and my laptop is Dingleberry.

At the risk of self-promotion, a while back I did a presentation on naming schemes for network devices, which have slightly different requirements than servers:

http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog31/abstracts.php?pt=NjExJ...

A big(ish) hosting company I once worked for used Caribbean islands. This rapidly turned out to be a mistake and it quickly turned into any islands, then cities, then god knows what :-)

My current scheme is using major LA thoroughfares (Pico, Victory, Ventura, etc) but as I'm unlikely to scale beyond two digits, I'm not worried ;-)

Did you did consult the following list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_in_the_Caribbea...?

Very cool! I suspect they did not exhaust that list :-) Though "Barrel of Beef" doesn't seem like server name material to me.

We used Tintin characters: tintin, haddock, calculus, snowy.

Going on a tangent: Did you read Tintin while living in America? Because from what I've understood, those comics are almost unheard of there. Is that not true?

I've seen many volumes of Tintin at the bookstores in NYC, both independent shops and Barnes & Noble. I also remember them from youth, but wasn't a big fan. I don't think they are super popular, but have been available.

I don't know about the rest of America, but they were pretty well known in Cambridge, where I first discovered them.

Last summer, I went through the whole series with my kids as bedtime stories (minus Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America, which are a little beyond my PC threshold). We loved them! I have no idea why every kid in America doesn't slurp them up like candy.

Blisterin' barnacles! I was introduced to Tintin with the animated series on Nickelodeon. Probably watched too much TV when I was a lad

I use random names from Firefly - there is actually a goodly number of you think about it for a bit.

I use names from various books, in no particular fashion. Most of my names are from Tad Williams books, but I've been known to use the names of Anne McCaffrey's dragons as well, with some names from Norse mythology tossed in for good measure.

My current workstation is pfefirrit. In the past, I've had fizz, click, karthwine, ninebirds, nuzzledark, nipslither, bast-imret, earnotch, and knet-makri as servers. My old workstations were cloudleaper, bite-then-bark, pop, hushpad, and tailchaser. My firewall was meerclar.

As far as laptops go, I've used munin, hugin, odin, krelli, skoggi, krauka, nrefa-o, mnanth, and caylith.

Back when I did IT for a couple of schools, I used chemical compounds in a certain fashion to reflect room numbers.

We use names of beers and liquors. Works well enough.

In college, I had a lecturer who named companies in an assignment after characters in The Wire (Avon Barksdale etc). It's possible he downloaded this from the internet though. It certainly made things a little more interesting.

Bond women. Kissy, Pussy, Solitaire, Domino, Vesper, Honey, Goodnight...

Bonus points for when someone asks which computer you are using and you say, "I'm on Pussy."

I worked at a place that gave female names to all the computers. It was a little awkward.

josh@moneypenny:~$ echo "I actually do the exact same thing."

Mine are named after Star Trek characters.

Troi (MacBook), Picard (iMac), Locutus (Mini), Crusher (MBP).

At uni, most of the computers were named after distilleries. i.e. Livet, Morangie, Grant, Islay etc.

I once used programming languages for a small lab. They were identical machines and the weird thing was 'java' was the slowest and 'arc' always needed to be rebooted.

For my own devices, I just name them anything related to space exploration. I make it memorable and appropriate. Launchpad was where I did all my creative work. Pocket Rocket was a Mac Mini. My iPod was Cassini (comparatively small / weak spacecraft); when I lost it, I posthumously renamed it Atlantis (after the Shuttle).

Originally I named devices after computer science visionaries — the computer I built, I named Kilby, after Jack Kilby.

In the 90s, fruits. Coconut, kiwi, orange. Had a Cisco named passion. When you'd ping it from the Solaris box (pineapple) it would say "passion is alive".

Around 2000 with Grub I did bugs. Ant, roach, mosquito, brainbug (from starship troopers).

2005 or so a buddy got started using Roman names for servers. Dido, Leptis, Aeneas, Ulysses, Spartacus.

My home computers are super heros/villains. Superman, ironman, greenlantern, jeangrey, magneto, thing, hulk.

I've always had (what I would guess are) odd schemes. My first naming scheme was based around beat poets (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs), but currently, my scheme is 'cool Jacks that I like', which includes Bristow, McCoy, Kerouac, Kevorkian, Kirby, etc.

BSG callsigns sound awesome, and somebody else mentioned colors, but I think scaling that gets confusing, especially if you're color blind, as I am.

My main home computer, a laptop, is named Workhorse. But after seeing some of the creative naming techniques people in this thread have used, the next machine(s) added to my home network will be named using Klingon swear words.

I quite like the idea of using the word 'petaQ' to name a computer, especially if it happens to be a Windows machine.

Probably not very original, but I use titles of SF books I like that also reflect on the machine (sometimes).

Here's some I've used:

- tau-zero

- subtleknife

- Dark Light (iPhone)

- Omega Device (iPod Nano - I like this one :)

- skyroad

- zodiac

My most successful naming scheme was using the names of Cheeses. There's a crapload of cheeses out there.

I think the idea is straightforward: Use short names you use rarely, and preferably give all your computer a theme.

I'm currently using Greek Gods, but surely Roman Gods should be just as efficient. Planets should work as well, if you include imaginary planets (From, say, Star Wars)

Doctor Who characters for my home systems here; my black MacBook is called Tardis, because it's bigger on the inside, and the Dell server was obviously styled by Davos, so it's called Dalek.

Naming schemes help keep the fun in managing computers.

I usually pick a name based on some piece of music that's nearby the first time I get asked to set one. Sleepwalk (Santo & Johnny), Skyscraper (Underworld), Hinterland (William Orbit), Zoolookologie (Jean-Michel Jarre)...

I've gone the Lord of the Rings route before using locations: shire, barrowdowns, moria, lothlorien, isengard, mordor, rivendell, etc. The only bad thing was that only about one in ten people knew how to spell isengard.

Amusing take:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/22/verity_stob_name_you... - Don't call me Ishmael - Choosing a name for your new PC

Coruscant, Hoth, Yavin, Dagobah, Tatooine, Dantooine, and of course, Deathstar

My workstation is named Casper, because it had a fried motherboard and I thought it was dead. Other option was Lazarus. Notebook is Pegasus, because it's powerful and can "fly around". Render nodes are RNn.

Our sysadmin insists on using numbers to name systems, in combination with an abbreviation representing the OS. For example, RHL015 is our 15th server running CentOS (Red Hat Linux). It's quite maddening!

Thundercats. I name all of my machines after the Thundercats.

Roman emperors: augustus, tiberius, caligula, claudius, etc.

I have in the past used characters from the Wheel of Time.

Currently using types of peppers in work.

Using characters or items from Neuromancer for personal stuff. My netbook is onosendai.

I'm following the Futura characters. My Unibody MacBook is called Bender because it indeed has a shining metal ass (although different kind of metal) :D

I just name them after whatever I feel like. Among them: alpha, hiro, zoidberg, LOKI (VMS box), fafnir, glenda, p9, illiac, jerq, perq, and beer.

Disney chose to name their computers like some planets; while the NASA chose to name their computers like some Disney characters :p

I used to name my computers after Cathedrals but there weren't enough that sounded neat. So I switched to names of English cities.

My portable is always DeepThought, my desktop/workhorse machine is always Earth, and my backup volume/server is always Magrathea

We used Babylon 5 characters on one network, but kept getting "duplicate name exists on network" when we got to "Zathras"

I kept running out of names with various schemes, but right now all my machine names are words that end in x.

I go with colors. My main machines are Indigo and Violet, and I have a server under my bed called Aubergine.

Transformers names have worked well for me. FortressMaximus and OmegaSupreme being some highlights.

All my computers are named after Star Wars planets. The recently acquired MacBook Air is "naboo".

Google sets and Greek mythological figures . For my personal list of 7 computers that's fine.

The twelve classical olympians were always enough for me, too.

My computers and devices are named after popular females of the 1920s:

- myrtle

- mindy

- mabel

- ilene

- irma

- iris

- patsy

- floy

- agnes

- nellie

Nellie, of course, is my beautiful NeXT cube.

My names are always the planets, and 'SOL' is always the name of my PDC.

I want a computer like Tony Stark's in Iron Man, so named mine Jarvis.

I use names of Star Wars planets and my wireless ssid is The Outer Rim

I like naming systems after ex-coworkers, and especially ex-managers.

This is, incidentally, the same Don Libes of Expect and Tcl fame.

I've got a pretty simple naming convention: interstates.

f@@k, s@@t, c@@t, crap, fart, bollocks, ar@e, etc all work great for computer names for me.

I knew I would risk karma on this one. but I'm not trolling, and these are the names of my computers and servers. It has worked well for me for years.

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