

Mistakes we made when naming our computers - sdfx
http://lbrandy.com/blog/2009/09/mistakes-we-made-when-naming-our-computers/

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robin_reala
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 :)

~~~
teej
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.

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

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

~~~
DannoHung
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.

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machrider
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starfleet_starships_ordered_by_class)

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.

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phsr
Great Serverfault.com question related to this:
[http://serverfault.com/questions/45734/the-coolest-server-
na...](http://serverfault.com/questions/45734/the-coolest-server-names)

My favorite answer: [http://serverfault.com/questions/45734/the-coolest-
server-na...](http://serverfault.com/questions/45734/the-coolest-server-
names/45791#45791)

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forinti
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.

~~~
scott_s
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.

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dfranke
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'.

~~~
davidw
> but I carried it on

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

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prabhup
Hi

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 .

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

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

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cedsav
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'...

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tesseract
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. :)

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pavel_lishin
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.)

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Periodic
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.

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callahad
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...

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

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

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dandrews
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:

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r7000
I use the names of lakes in Algonquin Provincial Park.

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Pistos2
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.

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davidw
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...

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

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Jem
My main PC/laptop is always called BOOBIES.

People tend to find it an amusing talking point.

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spc476
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.

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

[http://transformers.wikicomplete.info/list-of-all-
transforme...](http://transformers.wikicomplete.info/list-of-all-transformers-
characters)

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rglovejoy
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.

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riobard
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! :)

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jawngee
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.

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iigs
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". :)

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plinkplonk
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.

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

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

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JCThoughtscream
Pratchettian characters work rather well.

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

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dws
Diseases. Catastrophes.

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eru
Insects.

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vibhavs
That was a pretty pointless article.

