

Ask HN: How do you name your servers? - mashmac2

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.<p>So, HN, how do you name your servers?<p>To start things off, I've seen servers named for Transformers, One Piece characters, people in the Bible, and philosophers.<p>What are your best server name suggestions?
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weinzierl
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:-)

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memset
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.

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dcolgan
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.

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pg
At Viaweb we used to name them after Tintin characters.

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

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27182818284
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"

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jamescun
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).

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

~~~
ahen
This is brilliant.

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HarshaThota
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...](http://www.stackprinter.com/questions/the-coolest-server-names.html)

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johnmurch
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.

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kaolinite
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.

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joshAg
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>

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div
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 :)

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

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caw
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.

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p_4lexander
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.

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

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godisdad
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

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Zecc
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, ...

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tjasko
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>

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callmeed
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.

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xm1994
Had a pair of extranet firewalls once... Romulus and Remus
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus_and_Remus>

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

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tripzilch
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.

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dkuntz2
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.

~~~
LarryMade2
Paul, MuadDib and Usul?

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s-phi-nl
See <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1290106> for a former discussion.

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mryan
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.

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

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

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

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

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

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baconhigh
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 :)

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cl8ton
We use the cast from Seinfeld (Kramer, Babu, SoupNazi etc...)

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amccloud
Lately?

compute001-fluffy-switch-nv

Rinse and repeat!

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orangethirty
Toho monsters (Godzilla, Mothra, etc.).

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gcb0
role-colo-index, e.g. wwwsf27.domain.com

i'm boring as hell.

~~~
mchadwick
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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Sharma
Gandalf,Isaac,Einstein

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LarryMade2
Guardian and Colossus

