Ask HN: How do you name your servers? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you name your servers?

18 pointsmashmac243 comments

I've heard (and worked at places with) lots of interesting stories about hostnames within an organization, but I'd love to see if there's some consensus.

So, HN, how do you name your servers?

To start things off, I've seen servers named for Transformers, One Piece characters, people in the Bible, and philosophers.

What are your best server name suggestions?

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For anything serious I'd go with a numbering scheme, see [1] for examples and ideas. If it has to be names, the elements of the periodic system seem to be somewhat popular, see [2] for more lists.

Apart from that: I named my second computer[3] after a character from a book I was reading at the time. I didn't yet know it was the villain when I chose the name, so the name was not what I intended it to be. I stuck with the convention anyway.

It's always from a book I am currently reading or I have read recently and most of the time I choose the villains. Because virtual machines need names as well and I create them faster than I can read books I allowed characters from movies for anything virtual.

The nice thing about it is that it connects the machines to a period of my life (when I was reading a certain book or seeing a movie for the first time).

    [1] http://serverfault.com/questions/17274/
    [2] http://namingschemes.com/
    [3] My first computer was a C64 and had no name, other than C64:-)

A long time ago, I was fond of a young woman whose family was originally from Denmark. As the ultimate testament to my love, I named my computer 'danish'. Breakfast-themed computer names followed the in-joke: eggs, toast, waffle.

Years later, having moved on, I switched to jazz musicians (I play the saxophone.) coltrane, gillespie, parker.

Mine is the setup with One Piece characters as OP mentioned. This also includes my dev computers. Our setup is thus:

Prod for my LLC is Luffy since he is the captain. My desktop is Zoro since the desktop is the most powerful computer I have. My laptop is Usopp since I work with it the most and I sort of identify with that character. Another client server is Franky because that client was weird. A client server I setup once is Robin since that name wasn't taken.

Each character is sort of vaguely descriptive of the machine they name.

Another scheme I worked with once was physics words for movement. The dev machine was impetus, staging was acceleration, and prod was velocity.

I once got burned with putting funny filler text on a live production site. Naming servers creatively is a safer way of having fun that is also more subtle.

At Viaweb we used to name them after Tintin characters.

Awesome. I hope you didn't have a Thomson for dev and a Thompson for production :-)

Did you used original French names (Tintin, Milou, Haddock, Tournesol, Dupont & Dupond) or English ones (Tintin, Snowy, Haddock, Calculus, Thomson & Thompson)?

When I can, I enjoy naming them things like "Megahertz" or "my RAM" so that when they crash, people sound silly. "My RAM is down" or "Megahertz isn't working"

For StackBlaze servers effectively had 2 available hostnames, the actual logical hostname (<function><id>.<lan>.<datacentre>.net.stackserv.com. e.g. wb1.g1.rbx.net.stackserv.com, db2.g1.stb.net.stackserv.com), then a cname'ed nickname (We used pokémon for the nicknames. pikachu.net.stackserv.com, charmander.net.stackserv.com).

Dan Schultz wrote a great article on some naming conventions he uses that was inspired by Starcraft. http://slifty.com/2011/03/starcraft-network/

This is brilliant.

There used to be a thread on Server Fault[1] about this very topic which had some interesting ideas. We liked the idea of naming them after Mountains but ended up naming our servers after characters/places from BSG.

[1] http://www.stackprinter.com/questions/the-coolest-server-nam...

At a past job we used named of ski resorts (killington, okemo, snowbird,...). Although I always though it would be interesting to choose a music genre and go big - like 90s rap stars (2pac, jayz, Wu-Tang Clan, ..)

Just my My 2 cents -

Pick something that has a meaning to the person running it and some what relates to the organization.

I name my servers all after the muppets. There's something about typing ssh me@misspiggy that makes me smile.

I name my personal computers np-complete problems. so far I've used: knapsack, k-sat, TSP, and ILP.

here's the list I use when I need to name a computer: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_NP-complete_problems

Here at Chess.com we name them after Chess grandmasters (go figure). Capablanca, Glek, Krush, and so on.

Snakes here: mamba, taipan, rattlesnake and viper so far.

At work we use British fighter jets. Unfortunately, unlike the US, the British have pretty lame fighter jet names ('puffin', for example).

Just pick something with a lot of cool sounding names - makes announcing server changes way more badass.

I use names from Alice in Wonderland.

whitequeen is my macbook, while my gaming rig is bandersnatch. The wifi id is throughthelookingglass, while the Timecapsule is called thecheshirecat, my iPhone is the dormouse.

I've some unnamed devices laying around that I've been meaning to get to :)

Recently I've used the moons of Saturn (there are 60 of them): https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Saturns_moons. They're beautiful and unusual names.

A quote is missing in your URL. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Saturn%27s_moons is correct.

In college: beer names (i.e. shiner-bock) At first job: characters from 'The Simpsons' Later on at first job: elements (i.e. Fluoride) At current gig: something amenable to Chef like component-worker-01.environment01.foo.employer.com

At a previous job we used scientific words, with the exception that our boss had to be able to spell it at 3am if he got paged.

Lots of fun names there, but the best were the HA or failover pairs. Proton/Neutron, Concave/Convex, Diffusion/Effusion.

Haha, good ol' Star Wars planets here :p. I usually have them all start with the same letter... http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_planets

Had a pair of extranet firewalls once... Romulus and Remus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus_and_Remus

I use ancient Egyptian deities (Anubis, Ra, Osiris, Horus, Isis...)

1980's Baseball Players. So far, we have:

Mattingly, Dawson, Puckett, Sandberg, Gwynn, Ripken, Saberhagen, Joyner, and Rickey. We also had Gooden, but it had problems and we had to shut it down.

Every time I named piece of hardware Nyarlathotep, it either died on me or turned weirdly buggy. True story. Don't name your machines after an avatar of the Outer Gods.

Asterix characters: asterix, obelix, panoramix, ...

Planets/Roman deities: venus, ceres, apollo, jupiter, ...

Greek letters: alpha, gamma, zheta, ...

First names of famous scientists: albert, marie, alexander, ...

All of my computers are named after characters from Dune (thus far only the first book). Three of them were named after one character, with multiple names.

Paul, MuadDib and Usul?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290106 for a former discussion.

While I use fun names for my personal computers, work servers are always descriptive: mycocache1, mycodb1, mycodb2, mycoweb1, etc.

LotR characters: laptop is Legolas, brawny web server is Aragorn, dependable media server is Samwise, old laptop was Frodo, etc.

Lately? ec2-xx-xx-xx-xx.compute-1.amazonaws.com

In the past I've gone through Futurama, LoTR, The Simpsons, Saturn's moons and musicians.

Not servers, but here, we've named our database usernames from Futurama characters.

As A chem minor, I like anything chemical, Thorium is my most used VPS.

We use the cast from Seinfeld (Kramer, Babu, SoupNazi etc...)

one cluster a few years ago had arcade game names.

Pacman, bladerunner, alien storm etc.

Another was names of metal bands. Anthrax, slayer, metallica etc.

Naming servers is the best :)

Toho monsters (Godzilla, Mothra, etc.).

Gandalf,Isaac,Einstein

Guardian and Colossus

Lately?

compute001-fluffy-switch-nv

Rinse and repeat!

role-colo-index, e.g. wwwsf27.domain.com

i'm boring as hell.

Likewise. Machine names are there to make your life easier. Cute names aren't fun when you have more than a couple. When your brain's as small as mine, you have to minimize your lookups.

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