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Comment by idatum | Hacker News Reader

Not passwords but used movie references to name my machines on the corporate network. Pretty sure my "TMA-1" build machine was unique.

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> movie references

I was once tasked with reverse engineering a competitor's product, figured it might take a while but within minutes of running strings on one of the binaries it became clear one of the engineers must have been a major Game of Thrones fan. Talk about making your encryption passwords jump out :eek:

Random strings, folks, much safer to stick with random strings...

Heh. I wonder if it is still tradition in universities to assign quirky network names to their machines? Would anyone even notice these days, as these names are way less prominently displayed these days?

They greybeards who came before me used names from the lore of LotR. I used house names from A Song of Ice and Fire (better known as the early 2000s tv series Game of Thrones, though the first book was released in the 90s). The youngsters after me used Pokémon names.

I would hope so. UW CSE had fun names for every computer on their network, though my knowledge is dated to 2016.

Humuhumunukunukuapuaa was eventually renamed because anytime you had to type it really sucked.

My university has machines named "data" and "lore", I personally use scifi transportation on my machines (enterprise, firefly, stargate, galactica).

Is there room there for Roadtown and Not For Hire?

https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/chambless_edgar

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fabulous_Riverboat

Mid-80s, the Stanford TOPS-20 campus timesharing system had machines named Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth which users called The Tragedies. The system administrators did NOT like that.

Names from Tolkien, movies, and tv got popular as workstations got deployed. Initially we thought the management had unclenched but learned that end users picked the names as these were machines deployed by individual research groups.

This has me wondering. When I was in school about 2 decades ago they were using names of Greek or Roman gods for servers. Part of me wonders if many campuses even have many servers worth naming now, since all the services I used at that time have now been outsourced to Google or Microsoft long ago. I’m guessing there must still be a few servers in a rack even in a cloud-centric school, but the days of connecting to like “hermes.university.edu” to get email/FTP/web hosting must be gone basically everywhere by now.

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