Mistakes we made when naming our computers | Hacker News Reader

Mistakes we made when naming our computers

lbrandy.com

42 pointssdfx46 comments

Norse and greek gods do seem to be popular, I’d studied and worked at several places that follow that scheme. There’s a large scope for spelling mistakes though, as the article points out.

Best scheme I’ve used (if you can ignore the silliness) is Pokémon characters. There’s hundreds of them (and guaranteed to be more by the time you run out), the names are all fairly easy to spell and you’ve got pre-made iconography for connection shortcuts :)

We just switched to greek gods, ran out of muppets and magic roundabout characters.

Plus there's a well-defined order for IP address assignment.

Pokemon? Genius!

Well defined, very large set, built-in ordering.

My personal favorite that I've used is Transformers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Autobots http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Decepticons). This also lends itself to clever names for deployment scripts.

We did the same thing at my last job. It was the best.

did you happen to do that at a university... and was it the same university that 'DannoHung' wen to?

Luckily, there's an rfc for that http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1178.html

Cool. That's the same Don Libes who wrote Expect.

Hmm... every corporate place I've ever heard of uses acronyms related to the location and purpose of the machine.

If a machine gets repurposed, it typically gets wiped and reidentified.

My college used Pokemon names, incidentally. Which seems to work out pretty well since they keep adding new ones and none of them have accents or special glyphs.

My little startup uses Starfleet ship names. There are a shocking number of names available: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starfleet_starships_ord...

A lot of the names tend to sound good as computer names. It's hard to talk about machines named Bart or Spock or Frodo without getting a little embarrassed (IMO). But a computer named 'reliant' or 'intrepid' is pretty sweet.

Great Serverfault.com question related to this: http://serverfault.com/questions/45734/the-coolest-server-na...

My favorite answer: http://serverfault.com/questions/45734/the-coolest-server-na...

A friend of mine has a small business and he gave his machines the names of drinks and put the respective bottle on top of each machine: whisky, vodka, rum, etc.

That was done with beers at the systems lab at my old school. Machines could be renamed if you brought in the professor who ran it a 6-pack of the beer you wanted to be the name.

My home systems use Tolkien names, which while by no means an original idea, has the benefit that they will never run out, especially if you've read The Silmarillion. At work, the names are all music-related. I didn't start this one, but I carried it on after the admin who started it left. This also works well, aside from coworkers complaining that they can't remember how to spell 'staccato'.

> but I carried it on

That's an interesting issue. When to start over with a new scheme?

When naming/labelling physically the servers two main things to be taken for consideration.

SECURITY and CONVENIENCE

SECURITY : When other persons have physical view/access to our servers they should not be able to locate the role of servers by our namings like WEB , DB , PROD , TESTING etc. By this weakness they know which machine to attack.

CONVENIENCE : Our sysadmin should be able to identify server with ease.

We name by Rack , Location and Position. Example R1CA12 i.e Machine is in Rack1 California and 12th Server. This will ease our Remote Network Operations Center engineer to know the position and coordinate with local sysadmin .

I once worked at a company that used elements of the periodic table. Was nice in that you had ready made short abbreviations.

And if you ran out, just discover a new element and you're golden.

While I've used exotic names before, I prefer descriptive names, like web1, web2, db1, dev. etc..

When I'm ready to reboot a machine or drop a table, I like to see 'DEV' on the hostname and not 'DB1'...

At a former workplace the theme was sci-fi authors. At one point I noticed that all the Windows and Linux boxen were named after men and the Macs after women, which seemed vaguely appropriate, so that became a further informal convention. Mostly the names were chosen arbitrarily, but we had a G4 iMac which was called 'shelley' for presumably non-arbitrary reasons.

For my personal machines I decided to implement the same male/female scheme but for a theme I am using 'people somehow associated with Pink Floyd' e.g. vera, torry, storm, mallet, emily. I used to joke that if Apple ever came out with an x86 Mac I would have to call it 'layne', but they did, and I realized that PF (to my knowledge) only ever did one song about a transvestite, so that would not be a sustainable convention. :)

This wouldn't work very well for a business that had servers spread out far and wide, but my current theme is cities. Used to be Russian cities - Moskva, Leningrad, Irkutsk, etc. I've since switched to cities in Texas - Dallas, Austin, Houston. (Though I'm keeping Moskva forever.)

I work at a large university with a fairly flat domain. This means just about every computer is is name.university.edu, and every computer needs a name for the central database. The hardest part about this naming is avoiding conflicts. Most "common" naming schemes were taken two decades go, so adding a little prefix allows me to reuse a lot of names. Basically, adding another prefix exponentially grows the name space.

I opted for the most boring naming system because it made logical sense. [department abrev]-[PI abrev]-[usage abrev][Number]. This leads to names like ee-she-s03 for the third server for the Sheron group in the electrical engineering department. I can always create aliases for stuff that's commonly referenced.

I'm pretty happy with names of typefaces. They can even be tag names!

Router - Courier

Home server - Minion

Slicehost server - Perpetua

Laptop - Arial

Nokia N800 - Futura

etc...

We started using names of cheeses. I think the length of this list was the reason: http://www.cheese.com/all.asp

I've done exactly this. There's a huge number of cheeses. And they're quite distinct.

My home network uses names from Alien (ash, jonesy, mother, nostromo, ripley).

A pal's network used jazz musicians (mingus, monk).

Once upon a time some MIT machines were named after cold cereals (frosted-flakes, sugar-smacks).

A work friend, Chuck, passed away after a long illness. He was scheduled to receive a new computer and I ended up getting it instead. So naturally...

This is chuck.domain.com (Linux i686 2.6.30-gentoo-r6)

chuck login:

I use the names of lakes in Algonquin Provincial Park.

For the past few years, I've used New Testament cities. As time goes on and I need more, I move forward in time through Christendom.

At one place, we started off with beowulf and grendel, but then rapidly discovered that many of the other names are pretty much impossible. Stuff like hrothgar, healfdene, and so on.

Authors were a good one for an on-line bookseller I worked for (not Amazon). One of my current gigs has wines: merlot, cabernet, pinot, shiraz, etc...

We used the names of planets, once we ran out of those we started doing moons and stars. It's pretty badass.

My main PC/laptop is always called BOOBIES.

People tend to find it an amusing talking point.

At work, we use pet names (that is, we name machines after employee pets) and the virtual servers all get city names. I tend towards obscure towns in Florida (where we're located) while the other employees tend towards more famous cities.

We used names of Transformer names at my last gig, it was glorious.

http://transformers.wikicomplete.info/list-of-all-transforme...

My current scheme is to use Bay Area cities (e.g. sanjose, fremont, gilroy, etc.).

When I was at MIT, the convention they used for the print servers was characters from the novel _Ringworld_: teela, louiswu, nessus, speaker, etc.

I have to say I just LOVE HN --- I've been thinking about this for quite a while and was planning to ask "How do you name your machines" today and just found this article ... Problem solved! Thanks! :)

For internal servers we name them after hot girls: kaila, tila, evelyn, jenna, etc. You can always be assured a steady stream of hot women in the world.

For production: db1, web1, balancer1, etc.

Where I work I suggested we name (and we did) our printers after trees. (Oak, Pine, Fir, etc)

It was mildly uncomfortable (and very amusing) to hear people ask where to find "Rubber". :)

One of the companies I worked in used names of Hindu gods and goddesses. There are quite a few of those, and each god has multiple names so we never ran out.

My favorite is to use Star Trek TOS names http://www.ericweisstein.com/fun/startrek/

Don't tell anyone, but I use anime characters: kenpachi, guts, dix-neuf, spike, jet, elric, armstrong. Now THAT'S a large set.

Pratchettian characters work rather well.

Geographic stuff seems to work well. Printers in our company are named after US states. Fifty is plenty.

Diseases. Catastrophes.

Insects.

That was a pretty pointless article.

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