Choosing a Name for Your Computer (1990) | Hacker News Reader

Choosing a Name for Your Computer (1990)

datatracker.ietf.org

74 pointskezcub66 comments

My first thought was "all this goes out the window once you scale from pets to livestock," but my second thought was that, of course, we can automate these things, too.

eg human-readable-id[0] and some others I in a markdown page.[1]

0. https://www.npmjs.com/package/human-readable-ids

1. https://github.com/grantcarthew/awesome-unique-id

The real thing that seems obsolete to me, even among pets, is the idea of "reuse a computer without reinstalling the OS". Even by 2000 a regular wipe seemed standard (admittedly often because Windows), but I wasn't around in 1990 ...

Currently I'm naming all my devices after moons, from largest to smallest. So far I haven't confused myself with `io.local`, though I think about it a lot. It probably helps that it's a device that's pretty isolated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_satellites and sort by "mean radius", or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_b... and filter by color manually.

> but I wasn't around in 1990 ...

It wasn't a 5 or even 15 minutes process. It involved anywhere from 5 to 25 floppies, you need to sit and watch (at least occasionally) at the screen to change the disks, of course disk #13, which you used just fine yesterday, now has an unreadable sector and not only you need to procure a replacement but the computer you [tried to] reinstall is now surely non-operational.

I remember one of my first computers gifted to me with Windows 3.1(1?) on it and a bunch of games installed on it. I had a lot of fun with that computer.

One day I managed to screw up Windows so it wouldn't start anymore. Luckily they were kind enough to include a copy of Windows on floppy disks. One of the disks (7/13?) had an error on it, and I never was able to reinstall Windows. Damn you, GDI.DLL. I know it was always GDI.DLL it would fail on because I probably tried to reinstall it ten times, hoping for a different outcome.

Back to DOS for me. At least I learned batch scripting...

For reference, I do remember (admittedly mostly from retroactive poking around):

For Windows 95, boot floppies were generally assumed to be needed (El Torito was only invented in late 1994), though the CD was usually used for the main installation.

For Windows 98, boot from CD was widely assumed to work at least on machines that came with it.

I use moons too, however I am allocating io now for a local 10 gib k3s cluster...

"Livestock not pets" reflects the values of the surveillance industry, which needs scale-everything architectures as a result of treating users as livestock to be farmed. My machines each serve specific purposes, and I have a lovely cat. I don't need my own copy of AWS nor a pack of dogs.

Agree. Also why shouldn't we be nice to livestock? It's not a requirement to be nasty.

I remember when the original "pets vs cattle" viral post took off in the tech world, it wasn't long before folks from the farming world started hearing about it and saying, "actually, that's not how you treat cattle..."

Ignoring the inconvenient real details, in favor of an imagined model without them. Classic surveillance industry!

Yeah, my uncle had a small herd of cows and they all had names.

I used to say "writing software ain't like digging ditches; you don't get steady progress out for steady human-hours in" until I had a client who dug a lot of ditches. They informed me that ditch-digging also goes in fits and starts.

Ever since, I've had to say "writing software is like digging ditches."

Although, truth be told, ever since then I simply tell this whole story.

One of the many nearly useless things I built:

https://github.com/rbanffy/nsaname

I always use EVE Online ship names. Phones get frigate names, laptops get destroyer names, and big machines/servers get battle cruiser names.

https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Alphabetical_Ship_List

I use ship and colony names from Battlestar Galactica. Big x86 servers are battlestars, DRADIS for firewalls, NAS' get the colony names. All the ARM servers and SBCs get Cylon names. Personal devices get civilian ship names.

> Don't use long names.

There was a computer lab at my school where all the servers were named after rivers. "li" was very popular, while "euphrates" rarely had anyone else on it.

Probably because no one could remember how to spell it.

Mine had a wombatinfestation, named as a riff on the Berkeley OCF 'natural disaster' hostnames (lightning, earthquake, plague, etc).

Did everyone skip class the day they taught about the tab key?

Every computer, every directory, every file, every command, every option and argument is maximum three keystrokes long: the first character, the second character and the tab key :-)

Usually you don’t have auto-complete for remote hostnames which is what the parent comment is about.

I would say that usually you do. But in hindsight, that's a behavior that came with SSH (via known_hosts and ssh/config). So back in the rlogin days, yeah, autocomplete of hostnames was not common.

I've been using ssh for a long time and somehow it's never occurred to me that hostnames would autocomplete, hah. Every day is a school day.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a computer called “gandalf”.

Markforged, a company that makes 3D printers, uses a string of two words as a unique name for each printer sold. You never have to refer to a serial number. I think the second word is always an animal, so your printer might be called “sleeping giraffe”.

A local Unix users’ group once had a server named “morgoth”. I guess in general the Middle-earth legendarium is a nigh-inexhaustible source of cool computer names.

We always have a lot of fun coming up with 3d printer names, my favorite- "sir prints a lot"

wandb (ML data tracking) generates random run names using a similar strategy. Also something we implemented at a past company for our networked spectrometers. They'd get "element_adjective" as a hostname.

Another time, we called our drone onboard computers after the Valkyries. There are enough to go around and many of them are short and can be anglicised (e.g. herja, hrist, hildr, hrund).

Most of my devices are named after entities from Neuromancer, though I'm surprised how few people I know that have read it.

> "Most of my devices are named after entities from Neuromancer, though I'm surprised how few people I know that have read it."

As a young "hacker" way back in "ye olde days" of gaming, I played the computer game [0] which fortunately came with a paperback copy of the book at a time when I was an avid reader of sci-fi.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer_(video_game)

Formlabs does this as well for their 3d printers, my earliest encounter of this was when Docker started getting popular: https://github.com/moby/moby/blob/master/pkg/namesgenerator/...

I'm going through the list of US presidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit... and take their first names (if there are severeal with the same first name I only take it once) in order from oldest towards today. The latest computer is called Abraham, so there still many left before I have to call one of my computers Donald.

The birth year of American presidents is almost constant since the 90s. Doesn't look to be sustainable.

It only needs to hold until I die.

About a year into my first IT role we installed a lot of networking infra into schools. Every school, bar none, had their network infrastructure named after characters from Blake's 7 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake%27s_7)

The domain controller would inevitably be named Orac. So much so that we set them as defaults in the routers we installed.

A generational thing.

I use locations from Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. My PC is a black tower, so I called it Isengard. My fair MacBook Air is Valinor. The Raspberry Pi is Bree.

Surprising to see such casual notes as an RFC.

I guess it matches the tagline: "RFC documents contain technical specifications and organizational notes for the Internet", here: https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/

But I'm still more used to seeing strict specifications in this format...

This is an Informational RFC, there’s a plenty of them and because they aren’t specifications, there’s no particular level of rigor expected (April Fools RFCs are Informational, for one!)

My computers are named after the solar system planets. My external drives after the moons.

I have an old floppy drive that I call Pluto

This is what I do with my homelab too. My gateway is called sol, everything else orbits around it. Furthest out is an Intel NUC at a relatives place with Wireguard access called Pluto.

But more importantly, since a HN post about an RFC defined hostname for home devices I've started using the home.arpa suffix for all of them.

Related. Others?

Choosing a Name for Your Computer (1990) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36028410 - May 2023 (200 comments)

RFC 1178: Choosing a Name for Your Computer - 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 - Feb 2021 (121 comments)

Choosing a Name for Your Computer - 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 - April 2018 (173 comments)

Choosing a name for your computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5167998 - Feb 2013 (10 comments)

Choosing a Name for Your Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110017 - Feb 2008 (9 comments)

So the exotic animals stocked in Leonard Nimoy's pet shop has been advised against for decades? Computing is no fun anymore!

https://www.rowsdowr.com/2013/03/07/leonard-nimoys-pet-pad-e...

I let my kids name them. We have Salmon, Car, and Christmas, currently. Also a goldfish named Hot Tub.

I used to stress everytime I got a new computer because I was very picky about giving it a good short name. But nowadays I always have a number of computers in use (each with different purposes) and they just have names appended with numbers. So my primary personal laptop used to be Batman, but when I got a new one its called Batman2 and so on. Helps me track the role of the computer and its generation without decision paralysis on choosing a new good name.

I just name them after their role. Like mediapc, worklaptop, gamingpc, toastermanager

My computers sometimes have to interact with larger networks and generic names 'worklaptop' would not be distinct enough to be good names. Except for toastermanager, I like this one in its own right.

me showing up on the network, also named Batman

Well one of us is going to have to change!

I use elements in the periodic table. My laptop is Turbium and my spouse's is Polonium. My wifi hotspot is Actinoids, my spouse's is Lanthanoids. In the past I've broken out some of the names to mean something special. Commonly known radioactive elements (Plutonium, Uranium, etc.) were virtual machines. Noble elements were for rack mount machines (like our NAS).

Tea!

Oolong, jasmine, tetley, amgoorie, liptons, bushells, dilmah, twinings ...

Generic names for benzos have been my goto for awhile:

stilnox ivadel zolpidem

Pet peeve that MacOS defaults to using your full name … I just love sanitizing copy paste from terminal to remove my name all the time … WTH

I've been using names of chemical elements. They're nice since they come with abbreviations and associated numbers. So if there's host 'gallium', you know that it can also be referenced as 'ga' and that it's local IP address is going to be something like 192.168.1.31.

For the past decade-ish, I've been naming my computers after the cats from Diane Duane's Cat Wizards series (of which _The Book of Night with Moon_ is the first).

I've gone through all of them now, though, and need to decide on a new naming scheme before the next time my laptop gets replaced...

On a similar topic:

Software component names should be whimsical and cryptic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32807969 - Sept 2022

My router is skynet, my old Proxmox hypervisor was deathstar and a VM in it was stormtrooper, the Debian baremetal that replaced both is xwing, and my gaming desktop PC is themachine (from Person of Interest).

mine are all named after fictional places (current ones are "lspace" and "hadean lands") because I feel like a computer is metaphorically more like a place than a thing.

My two computers are named ‘spaghetti’ and ‘potato’. Although I think broke the rules of the linked article because potato is named after its bulky case and relative weight compared to spaghetti.

A friend of mine has a small office. At one time he used names of alcoholic beverages and put the corresponding bottle on top of each desktop.

I use names of painters I like at home: Goya, Mondrian, Repin.

if you're ever having trouble coming up with a name, head over to Wookiepedia. no shortage of star wars planet names.

I usually go for a name from whatever book I'm reading at the time. currently have hogfather (terry pratchett), ozzie (peter f hamilton, void trilogy), sparver (alaistair reynolds - prefect dreyfus novels), deathandgravity (iain m banks - culture series). I'd love to use more ship names from the culture books but they're all too long.

korolev, hammond, daedalus, apollo over here.

I went with Egyptian deities for a long time. Lots of simple names - ra, set, nut, isis.

Text link: https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1178.txt

I use ship and cylon names from battlestar galactica

I like using Monitor names from the Halo series. "Penitent Tangent" has gotten me weird looks before though.

Ashamed to say... Defaults prevail

> don't use domain names

Among much of the advice here, that one hasn't scaled too well.

i name mine after crystals or rocks

obsidian, jade, peridot, diamond, sapphire...

emoji hostnames are the most depraved scheme I’ve seen in the wild

personally I use musicians. my primary desktop, whatever the actual hardware, has been “coltrane” since the eighties

names of local fish species in my language have been serving me well for a while now

No mention of Japanese movie monsters ? What has become of the internet ??

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