Ask HN: How do you choose a hostname for personal devices? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you choose a hostname for personal devices?

I just built a new PC and I'm having trouble deciding on a hostname. I used to name them after the CPU inside, but my last PC got a CPU upgrade halfway through so the name didn't make sense anymore. So I guess I need a new system.

What are some naming systems you all use?

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I use old man names, old man names in this case being those names which where archaic when I was little and only very old men had them. No idea why, just started doing it 25 years ago and kept it up. But hostname for my main computer has always been yeoman, I assume it is because it does the yeoman's share but I really don't remember, might have just been a whim.

Out of all the comments, this one speaks to me the most. No idea why either :) but I think I have my new system. Thank you for posting this!

RFC 1178 has you covered: <https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1178.html>

From that RFC: "Some more suggestions are: mythical places (e.g., Midgard, Styx, Paradise)"

Midgard is not mythical.

Midgard is just as mythical as the Kali Yuga.

For a long time I used names of (usually) the transitional metals on the periodic table. It started just as "Titanium" for a PowerBook G4 since that was its codename anyway, but went on from there.

Then it transitioned to plants and trees: aster, begonia, willow, maple. I had a shift in life where I began to value the organic world more than dry, boring metals.

Rivers, all lowercase.

My first Linux machine was `congo`. My oldest extent one is `volga`. And my beefiest (biggest) machine is `nile`.

My local backup NAS is `danube`, and my offsite server is `yangtze`.

If I were you, and didn't want boring job-themed names, choose a theme and use it.

You could choose mountains, and your biggest machine could be `everest`, while your most sacred could be `olympus`.

Or you could choose cities, Pokemon, anime characters, authors, fish, mammals, etc. Any category with a lot of items. Seas, for example, won't work because there aren't many.

I use names from the ancient greeks.

Homeserver: Nyx is the Greek goddess of the night. She is one of the primordial deities and is often depicted as a powerful and fearsome figure, respected even by Zeus.

Workstation: The name "Xeno" comes from the Greek word "xenos," meaning "stranger" or "foreigner." While "xenos" itself is not a mythological figure, the concept of the stranger or the unknown plays an important role in many Greek myths and stories, often with dark or threatening connotations.

Notebook: Ker: Keres (plural of Ker) are Greek death spirits. They are winged entities that represent violent or untimely death and are often depicted as fearsome and ominous.

(I asked chatgpt for explainations of the names, because iam not a native english speaker.) I use the naming scheme like over a decade now.

I like the name of my home net the most. Its enti.ty.

omg same here, I used Greek Mythological creature list from wiki

I follow RFC 1178: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc1178

The theme I use is Final Fantasy characters.

Pokemon for me.

DOTA2 characters.

Pudge is for a fat server with some VMs and more RAM.

Invoker is multi-purpose VPS without a specified one goal.

Riki is a RPi.

Rylai (Crystal Maiden) is for a MacMini, because it's all white and reminds me of snow.

I had Meepo for hosting a Matrix instance. Social communication means multiple people, so Meepo seems to fit perfectly. But it's switched off now (Meepo is not an easy character to play).

I have Ostarion for a seedbox, I'm switching providers from time to time, and I keep killing it and raising a new instance once every while.

http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html

I'll share overlapping advice: don't name (conference rooms) after geographical locations or places, eg: "We're meeting in Colorado/Houston" ... too much opportunity for confusion.

I spent a little time looking for the OG "hacker's dictionary" style advice for hostname naming, but it's tough to find now, and the RFC is more official and close enough.

My fun little naming technique for my "fleet" of pi-zeros was "juan, deux, tree, faux, ..."

Cattle not pets means you can pick "fun" names for your personal (pet) computers, eg, my first SSD Max Mini I called "rock", first laptop after that I called "slab".

Something emotional or memorable is nice, or just keep flipping through word-pairs from diceware to find something suitable. https://diceware.dmuth.org/

OwnerType

JakeBook = MBP

JakePods = AirPods

JanePad = iPad

Short, easy to tell whose device is which in the house, uncreative.

Context - I'm nearly 50 and had a ZX81. Doom on an IPX network with 486 level machines is where I had to start naming devices for LAN parties.

As a teenage boy I gave the computers female names which appealed to me. Never people I knew except by coincidence, but Sarena, Lucy, Kim, &c. were assigned to a machine once without being reused. Maybe they had a mindspace as characters in my life?

As time passed and I started living with various partners, names have changed to a more adult way of working.

I now have abbreviated owner and device descriptor. Exempli gratia: 'PredBook' is my Panasonic Toughbook. 'PredPS4' is self explanatory.

Pokemon.

Bonus: If you remember the numbers and do static assigment, now you have a scheme to map names to IP addresses in your head. An old Pokemon poster becomes an address lookup table.

Any familiar theme with an ordering (periodic table?) should do the same!

1,025 Pokémon.. if only it was three less it would've fitted in a /22. Alas, /21 it is.

Frist name of the primary user + device name or [description + year of purchase]

Tim’s iPhone 13 Jamie’s MacBook Air 15

Alternatively function (+ location or for espHome devices their Mac suffix)

Sonos Kitchen Sprinkler-0f3812 hotwater-pump-09ac88

I’ve been using sci-fi authors. My laptop is “lem”, the cluster is “Gibson” with machines numbered from zero. The Mac Mini is “harlan” after Harlan Ellison (didn’t want it to be confused with that Oracle guy). The Windows machine is named “Brian” after Brian Herbert, because he is a terrible writer. There’s also Douglas Adams, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Charlie Stross, and many others.

I'm boring and usually just call them by their function. "Gaming desktop", "TV streamer", "work laptop", etc.

Back in the last century I worked for a company called MountainGate, where all the machines were predictably named after mountains. This suited my backpacking self well, and I continued the tradition with my own hardware after leaving: Dana, Tresidder, Hoffman, Lyell...

Anarchist writers are my present theme: Goldman, Proudhon, Bookchin, Kropotkin... perhaps Graeber will be next.

related to this, in my first tech job as a UNIX guy at a Wall St. bank, my mentor was really into Hawaii, all the servers in our group were named after hawaiian volcanoes, e.g. mahukona, maunakea, kilauea, hualalai, etc. it was NOT fun, all of us kinda hated it, but i suppose it did engender in us a strong attention to detail!

I have a wordlist I just chose a random name from. The words contained in the list are supposed to be short & unique.

https://git.sr.ht/~monotux/homelab/blob/90fcbc11cc6cf1c73900...

I name hosts after a place in the city I live in that is not where I live. Some hostnames from recent years are khamovnik, whitby, zamalek, sanduny.

It's interesting because it makes me consider places that I don't go to every day, and then rate them for "hostnameability" and so on. Ends up with hostnames being quite memorable.

Devices in my house are prefixed with the owner of the device (CRDNL- or CZZN-) then generally around the reason on why the device was built/upgraded.

For example, I've got CRDNL-NIPPON for a machine that I was intending to take with me to Japan, and my partner's machine is CZZN-VTUBER for when she was getting into being... a VTuber.

For personal devices, carried on me, they're used in many contexts, and so I choose simple names with some self-description. I'm currently using k2mbp, I pun this into a mountain theme on this host. My previous laptops have included, kmbp, mmbp, nmbp. I've liked this over descriptive or evocative names.

With a few exceptions, types of knives (because knives are symbolic of logical thought). Once a machine is given a name, that name is never reused.

I don't match the hostname to the purpose of the machine specifically to avoid the problem of the machine's purpose changing, and to make it easier to avoid reusing names.

For twenty years I've used early church fathers, one device for each letter of the alphabet. So Ambrose, Basil, Clement, Dionysius. When a device is retired, a new device can take that letter of the alphabet with a different name, so Ambrose is replaced by Augustine, for example.

Since Apple Silicon debuted, I've been naming my machines after early computers. My M1 Macbook Air was named "Eniac" and my M3 Max Macbook Pro is named "Whirlwind". Also, not exactly the same but my phone is named "Memex", which I think is both cute and appropriate.

You could do that, with fictional computers:

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

Of course "The Government Machine" or "The Mechanical Brain" have spaces in the name, which is kind of annoying unless you run macos. :)

I’ve had pet rabbit nearly my entire life and tend to name my devices after things rabbits do or nicknames I’ve given them - hopper, sniffer, nibbler, loafy, etc…

My college computer lab used element names. The ones hardest to spell had the least amount of people connected to them.

I've only had at most 3 computers running at the same time that are truly 'mine', with no other function that I could name easily, like "NAS 2" or "Backup Home"

They rotate the names Balthasar, Melchior, and Casper

Characters from the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy. Currently I have arthur, eddie, zarquon, trillian, alice, hotblack and marvin

This lab I was in used to use Scottish mountains. Some of which were visible from the lab window, sometimes.

The trick is to pick a fun theme.

For instance, I like to name all my machines after dwarfs.

So dwarf1, dwarf2, etc etc

What do I do once I've reached 7 dwarves?

Use their middle names.

This is an answer https://mnx.io/blog/a-proper-server-naming-scheme/ for cattle not pets.

One place I worked at used Red Dwarf characters, Hollister, Cat, Toaster, Rimmer etc

TV show characters can be good

I normally use Greek gods for snowflake servers

A concatenation of owner / location and device for LAN devices. JohnsPixel4, LoungeTV,

Famous chemists, physicists and computer scientists. Turing, Bernoulli, Lovelace etc… with a rough association between the namesake and function.

Prior to that was using Jupiter and its moons but ran out of named ones.

Mine are all named after ships from the Expanse, generally based on what they are or how I use them. My phone is the Rocinante, big beefy desktop is the Donnager, NAS is the Nauvoo etc.

I use Seinfeld characters - major characters for main servers, minor characters for other, tangential servers. Not very original, but works for me :)

Dragon name generator:

https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/dragon-names.php

Mine are all named after planets from Asimov’s Foundation books.

I usually just use my name (or shortened username) + the laptop model. Like "resxps" if I had a Dell XPS, or "respad" if I had a Thinkpad.

I got over the trend of naming them after cartoon characters/greek gods/etc a loooong time ago.

Device use/users name/number.

Esoteric names are just embarrasingly silly.

Celestial bodies for a while, lots asteroid and moon names to use!

After I rationalised my home network it just feel back to “productname.internal.suffix”

https://namingschemes.com/Main_Page

Human languages. There are more than 7000 and I highly doubt I’ll ever have more than a few hundred devices in my lifetime.

I name mine after major rivers. Had a mekong, nile, danube. Sometimes it’s wordplay, my first Mac was Potomac.

You beat me to it! And I have had machines with some of the same names.

Characters from the Mario universe (except Mario and Luigi): toad, peach, bowser, goomba, kamek, etc.

Salads:

PCs are named after lettuces Printers are tomatoes Routers are condiments like croutons Cameras are carrots

The name of the device and the year I bought it - "simon-macbookpro-2023" for example.

Not me, but I know someone who uses the names of galaxies. I use members of the wutang clan

Character names from the novel Wittgenstein's Mistress. For example "Kate".

I use 'hacker' terms.

I've got Mainframe (my server), Phreak (my phone), Baud (my laptop), etc.

I use names from Stargate.

Ships are personal devices, races are servers, planets are network devices, etc.

all of mine are named after songs by the Japanese noise band Boredoms. so far I have TV Scorpion, Mama Brain, Chocolate Synthesizer, Telehorse Uma, Pop Tatari, Seadrum, Super Going, and Domsbore

Names from Black history and the arts: frederick, joplin, randolph, etc

I name my machines after Neutral Milk Hotel song titles and lyrics

Places where I felt happiest: a beach, a mountain, a city.

I do horses from various media. Epona, Trigger, Shadowfax.

Celestial bodies. Saturn and Jupiter have a lot of moons.

I settled on US presidents, in order, a while back.

Currently on Fillmore.

Descriptive words translated into an uncommon language

I use characters from books I've enjoyed.

Anime names. I’m partial to vegeta and goku.

I use Japanese god/goddess names :)

Norse mythology

Characters from Beyond Good and Evil.

Food.

Pudin, Pizza, Sushi, Cake, Fries, Spaghetti, etc.

amino acids, alkanes, or elements

username+location

What exactly do you mean by username? Do you use only a single user on every device?

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