
Hostnames - whalesalad
http://seriss.com/people/erco/unixtools/hostnames.html
======
spindritf
There's an RFC on that, too.

"Choosing a name for your computer"
[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178)

Shades of colours, for example
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Shades_of_blue),
are a good, safe source of names.

~~~
lclarkmichalek
Any Category: page on Wikipedia is great. I've been using
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_foresters](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:German_foresters)
for a while now.

~~~
oftenwrong
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Categories](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Categories)

~~~
GrinningFool
These names, of course, could only be used for VM hosts.

------
nostromo
We use Pokemon.

There's something super memorable about Blastoise, Slowbro, Squirtle,
Ninetales, Jigglypuff...

I also color my tabs the color of the Pokemon for fast reference.

~~~
whalesalad
This is freaking brilliant. I grew up with that game and never even considered
using them for hostnames.

~~~
pantalaimon
I always had the idea, but never enough machines to name.

------
perlgeek
Or simply have a naming convention for hosts. I realize that only makes sense
for sufficiently large setups, but once your setup is large enough, it does
make things easier.

At $work we maintain setups for customers, and our FQDNs are roughly
<function><counter><environment>.<customer>.<ourdomain>.tld. So the second
database server in the testing environment for customer "nasa" (hypothetical,
of course) would be called db02t.nasa.<ourdomain>.<tld>.

It does make it pretty obvious from the FQDN what the used is being used for.

~~~
tillk
I agree with this. Call servers after their purpose. I don't grow attached to
servers anymore — especially in the cloud.

~~~
robbles
It looks like there's two types of answers in this thread, and the difference
between them is whether their infrastructure is cloud-based or running in a
datacenter:

\- Cloud: "Who cares? Name them after pokemon or dinosaurs, you can always
reprovision and they won't last very long."

\- Datacenter: "But what if the name doesn't make sense 16 months from now??"

------
aristus
First rule of running a farm: don't name your animals. You'll get too
emotionally attached when it comes time to put them down. Yes it's funny and
cool et cetera. But, and I say this with love and twenty years' experience,
for fucksake: take the time to plan a sensible ontology and stick with it.
Hostnames should describe the purpose, capabilities, and disposition of your
assets. Nothing more and nothing less.

~~~
paul_f
This approach "Hostnames should describe the purpose, capabilities, and
disposition of your assets" requires you to rename your servers when you
repurpose them. And that's an equally bad idea.

~~~
aristus
Nah, renaming during a reprovision is fine. You gotta stuff that information
_somewhere_ , and it might as well be in the name of the thing. Also remember
that a machine / IP address can have as many alternate names as you want in
the DNS system.

------
jstsch
Periodic table: hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon... and
shorthands... h.yourcompany.net, etc... :)

~~~
Cakez0r
This is my favorite one. For extra awesome, you can use the atomic mass of
each element as the last octet of the device's IP address.

~~~
thelibrarian
Nice - but don't you mean Atomic Number, not Atomic Mass? The atomic numbers
(i.e. the count of protons in the nucleus) are the nice non-overlapping
integers 1-118, whereas the masses are all over the shop, and has overlap with
isotopes of other elements.

~~~
Cakez0r
Yep, you're right.

------
sdfjkl
I've used roman emperors (caligula, augustus, nero, otho, etc.).

Also notable is that of my ISP - they use words ending in “less”, for example:
“priceless” is the accounting system, “thankless” the support ticket system
and “clueless” the customer login.

------
gmjosack
After working in a few pretty large environments I have some pretty strong
opinions about hostnames. I've seen everything from cute theme based names to
function/role based names to meaningless uuid based names.

Usually you see the theme based names in much smaller environments, though
I've seen it up to hundreds of machines. One problem I have with this approach
is that people begin to personify machines, excusing their behavior. "Oh
that's just akira being akira." This is counter to actually understanding and
diagnosing problems. You're also relying on potentially faulty/emotional
memories rather than having an actual stored account of issues. Not to
mention, once you have a sufficient number of machines you're going to need a
decent service database to know what runs what anyways.

Function/Role based names are what I have the most historical experience with.
CBS Interactive, CNET, YouTube, and Dropbox all went this route. This often
seems like a great idea and can get you really far. Most configuration
management allows you to define classes/nodes/etc based on regular
expressions. Sudoers has built in support for hostname globbing. It's also
easy to tell what a machine's role is when you get an alert. So why wouldn't
you want to go this route?

This method has some pitfalls that become increasingly burdensome as you grow
into a larger amount of machines. You might have many types of services that
run on a single hardware class. This introduces overhead whenever you need to
update a machines role. Imagine it's Saturday and your mobile-web pool is
suddenly under provisioned. Well, we have plenty of capacity in our web pool.
Just need to rename the host in the machine database, update DNS, update DHCP,
etc. While this might not seem like a lot of effort it definitely adds up.
When I worked on a fantasy sports product we were constantly renaming hosts as
various seasons came around. Same thing with just keeping spare/provisioned
hosts around. How do you know how to name the host so that someone can just
grab it when they need it? You also eventually get the boxes that serve more
roles than the box describes itself as. You'll end up with a box call misc or
admin and no one remembers that one day someone set it up as your static
origin.

Another fun problem is the inability to describe more in depth what a box
does. mysql255 doesn't tell you if it's a master/slave, which data is on it,
should it be backed up? I've actually seen places that encoded all of this in
a hostname. This is the extreme but it does happen.

The interesting thing about both theme and function/role based names is that
to use them effectively in a large environment you already need good tools for
managing the roles because the hostname is not effective enough.

At Dropbox, they started with functional/role based names but we decided to
move to positional hostnames. These encode the dc, rack, position, and
chassis. One immediate benefit we saw with this was quickly identifying when a
rack or quad goes down. It's very apparent in monitoring just at a glance. We
also have a service database that maps hostnames to tags/roles and those tags
appear along-side alerts so you can tell right away which service is affected.
We get benefits in easy preprovisioning and reprovisioning. Our configuration
has become more generic and easier to comprehend. We can run multiple roles
easily on one machine and it's easily discoverable what machine serve what
role. In puppet we use an External Node Classifier rather than regex. We only
have to worry about base config when a rack is initially installed.

That's not to say this method is flawless. One of the biggest drawbacks to
this approach is that machines become harder to talk about and typing them is
more difficult. I'd argue that you shouldn't care about specific machines
unless they're a problem and in that instance copy/paste should always be used
to avoid typos. There's some cool things you can do with PowerDNS' Pipe
Backend to get dynamic resolution to service names. Another problem with this
approach is it just requires a lot more tooling to get started. Obviously not
everyone has the time to build all of the infrastructure around this ideal.

Anyways, sorry for the rant, but everywhere I've worked we've started with
role based names and regretted it in the long term. Now that I've finally been
able to live what I've long dreamed of, I couldn't imagine choosing another
solution.

Obviously hostname conventions are a contentious issue so I won't say anyone
is wrong, but these are my experiences.

~~~
joseph
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people name a host after a product, say
'mysql-prod-101', then later they decide to switch from MySQL to Oracle. I
worked in an environment where a number of hosts contained 'tomcat' in the
name but they were all running weblogic. Better to name based on the role, as
you say, so the mysql-prod-101 would be better named db-prod-101. However,
I've come to think that nowadays with configuration managment it's not really
necessary to give hostnames at all. People usually don't like that suggestion
when I bring it up, but if you are using something like puppet's 'facter' to
run actions only on hosts that match certain 'facts', what do you really need
hostnames for?

Edit: I just reread your paragraph about using positional hostnames. This
seems like a good use, because the main problem I see with role based
hostnames is that hosts can take on multiple roles. But in general the
hostname seems unimportant if you are tagging your hosts with roles.

~~~
colanderman
Ya, all our dev tools servers are named after the product they're running.
(Well, most of them; one is named after a mythological being; one is named
after its function.) As a user, this is frustrating because rather than
remember what _function_ I'm trying to access (e.g. mail, wiki, bugs, etc.) I
have to remember what Atlassian decided to name their product that implements
the function I want.

(Fortunately some entires in /etc/hosts + a local Apache server set up with
RedirectRules fixes this annoyance, at least for myself…)

------
joshfraser
Cute naming conventions are fun when you're small and have no intention of
growing the network. If you're planning to scale, you may as well start with
practical names that give some context for the location and purpose of each
box. Your team have more important things to remember than which country mario
lives in and whether pluto is an app server or a database.

~~~
jimmcslim
I agree, and even if you're small I think having more sensible names is
probably a better sign of 'maturity'. On my home network I'm moving back to
naming new devices and VMs by type and purpose (e.g. server01, raspberry01,
htpc01) rather than continuing the naming convention I had.

------
kordless
My ISP in the 90s had fruits for hostnames. The main Cisco router was called
'passion'.

Shortly after setting it up, I pinged it from a Solaris box. The response was
'passion is alive'.

I tell this story every time there is a 'what do you call your hosts?'
discussion!

~~~
matiasb
At my CCNA class the teacher used local politicans names for routers/switches,
I remember it was election period and routing classes usually ended up with
discussions about politics.

------
namecast
After many, many nights spent tracking down servers named after:

Indian food dishes (30 of em! "where is jalfrazie?") Great US mountains (ugh.)
'win2003' the Sun box (ugh again. don't name the box after the OS running on
it...)

...i'd say my favorite was 'appname-colo-
number#-rackunit#-rack#.airportcode.yourdomain'. This way, the db server in
your new york colo JFK1 is easily found in rack unit 20 of rack #5
(db01-20-5.jfk1.example.com).

Once you have +200 servers, having physical location and role mapped to the
hostname is a game changer. Even better would be having just a six digit hex
hash that you could look up in a noc dashboard.

Note that all that other cutesy stuff is fine as a _CNAME_ , but the FQDN
might as well be made significant since it needs to be unique anyway.

~~~
Karunamon
I can see mapping physical location to hostname being a problem though,
especially in a virtual environment.

Even if you're not doing any of that, it only takes one move and you have to
rename your systems, a process that is varying degrees of tricky.

------
bobf
Setting up a standard naming convention for hostnames is more logical,
efficient, and scalable. Include useful information in the hostname, so you
don't have to map random lists of names to functions. "What does server 'Foo'
do again? Oh, it is a database server. Was that production, dev, or test?" Do
you (or one of your operations team) want to be figuring that out at 2AM when
you get an alert? Depending on your setup, something like this may be
appropriate: <location>-<notation of physical/virtual>-<function>-<#> (e.g.
bos-xen-mysql-005, being a virtualized Xen-based MySQL server in Boston). If
you have multiple environments (dev/test/prod), add that too.

------
lost-theory
Cute server naming schemes are one of my pet peeves. In my experience the only
two logical choices are: sequential numbers (e.g. foo1, ..., foo100, ... if
your company name is Foo Corp.), or hashes / uuids (like amazon instance IDs,
e.g. i-977a24e3). If you want to give a server a memorable or cute name, use
DNS or some kind of alias.

~~~
Theodores
Read the aforementioned RFC - with sequential numbers you are not naming them.
I can imagine how thrilled your colleagues are if they have to ssh into i-977
what was the rest of it?

~~~
lost-theory
The RFC seems to back me up:

    
    
        You might as well just call them "1", "2", and "3".  The only time this kind of
        naming scheme is appropriate is when you have a lot of machines and there are
        no reasons for any human to distinguish between them.  For example, a master
        computer might be controlling an array of one hundred computers.  In this case,
        it makes sense to refer to them with the array indices.
    

When you're starting off with your cute naming scheme, how do you know how
many machines you'll manage in the end? Most places I've worked at have
hundreds of servers. Using a simple, easy to follow, don't-make-me-think
standard from the beginning is the only thing that makes sense IMO.

To give a server a meaningful name, use DNS.

edit: Also, to take your complaint about "i-977.. what was the rest of it?"
and turn it around - imagine this scenario: provision 20 new app servers named
foo40..foo59 OR provision 20 new app servers and think of 20 cool names to
match our existing cool naming scheme of leonardo donatello michaelangelo
raphael master-splinter shredder blah blah blah :)

------
chrismorgan

      python -c "import random; print random.choice(open('/usr/share/dict/words').read().split())"
    

Nerd factor: really, _really_ high.

P.S. you're still allowed to exercise the power of veto.

I've managed to convince others to let me use this technique to form a team
name in a couple of Uni projects.

~~~
girvo
That is really neat. Never even through of that.

"protonymphal" \-- I think I want to call my new band that.

------
sean13013
I like to use elements. Bonus if you're working with the first half of a /24,
last octet = atomic weight. 10.0.0.1 = hydrogen, etc.

------
smkelly
How about this site ([http://namingschemes.com](http://namingschemes.com)) for
hostname schemes? Honestly, though, I prefer hostnames that tell you what a
machine does.

------
mverwijs
I stepped away from naming hosts the year I learned to use Puppet. After being
able to create an infrastructure based on code, the idea of naming hosts just
seemed pointless.

~~~
rcfox
Can you elaborate on that? My company uses Puppet, but we've configured it to
determine what to set up based on the hostname of the machine. (I have no idea
if that's ideal, but it's what we've got.)

------
nine_k
Quoting from memory:

 _«We used to treat our physical machines as home pets, having few of them,
giving them proper names, caring about them individually.

Now we treat virtual machines as cattle on a large farm, marking them with
numbers, denying them any individuality, and killing them when we don't need
them any more.»_

------
LeafStorm
At ITECS, our Systems division uses practical names like engr-ras-201 for
servers. However, we have a bit more fun with workstations. My machine was
named "waytso." I asked my boss what it stood for once, and she said that
after the machine that used to sit on that desk had died, Desktop Support sat
down an old Dell Dimension to hold us over until they could get a newer
machine ready.

It ended up taking a few months, and one day, they called her and said, "Hey,
we're ready to image the new Webteam workstation. What should we set the
hostname to?" "Waytso." "Waytso? What does that mean?" "Why Are You Taking SO
long!?"

------
txutxu
I've seen myself searching for a compilation like this one time ago.

I miss some other traditional in other locations of the world, but still for
me it's a great compilation I just saved for "the next time I see myself
searching for it".

Thanks.

------
yamaneko
My lab uses painters. We have DaVinci, VanGogh, Munch, and others. What's cool
about these hostnames is that we can find out other painters and learn stuff
about them, such as name pronunciation, paintings, etc. When we have a new
machine, we search for another painter, we look at their paintings. This is
good to learn new stuff. Another good category would be rock 'n' roll bands:

\- "Hey, I will run some experiments on zeppelin tonight. Is she free? Thank
you." \- "All our computers play a song from its hostname band. Except
pinkfloyd. No one had patience to listen to a song for 20 minutes."

------
foohbarbaz
The morons in IT department in my current company have accomplished an amazing
feat with the host names. We have one host name that I have been using for 2
years almost every day and I still have not memorized it! I am having to cut
and paste it every single time.

The host names were invented so people won't have to memorize IP addresses. IT
morons here with their "functional hostnames" have managed to defeat the
purpose of hostnames, so that they are now harder to remember than IP
addresses!

Please please please get a clue, use geography, mythology, Simpsons, anything
but stupid "bisappjmpthatthislakdh000283".

------
bbx
I recently designed several themes for a website. To simplify my naming
process, I decided to find, like OP did, an already defined list of names and
ended up using Paris' Métro stations [1].

Some examples:

    
    
      - Alesia
      - Concorde
      - Dupleix
      - Exelmans
      - Madeleine
      - Pyramides
      - Solferino
      - Trocadero
      - Voltaire
      - Wagram
    

As a bonus, you can use the Métro lines' color to visually identify your
themes (or hostnames).

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Paris_metro_stations](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Paris_metro_stations)

------
vonskippy
location-service-type-number

    
    
      accting-ws-01
      email-server-01
      building1-upstairs-switch-01
      eastgroup-noc-router-01
    

Why go cutesy when you can actually define what they do and where they are?

~~~
jimmcslim
Perhaps the question 'how do you name your servers?' should be added to tech
interviews, the more cutesy the response, the less mature/experienced the
interviewee possibly is (i.e. having not been burnt by the obfuscation of such
as scheme)?

~~~
blibble
I don't buy this logic.

Renaming machines is a pain, and they inevitably end up with more/different
stuff on them than was originally intended, then your "helpful" name like
pukweb01 (production, uk, web, 01) is worse than "pikachu" (as it's
incorrect).

the correct way to do this is to give the machine a name with no meaning
(maybe pikachu, maybe box005) and have a list of the services running on each
machine, and use DNS for those (say www1/ns1 that CNAMEs to the actual
hostname).

personally, I'd argue that anyone that calls machines things like "pukweb01"
has had little to no experience with a rapidly evolving system...

~~~
philwelch
If you're repurposing the machine anyway you might as well totally wipe and
reprovision it, right?

~~~
gmjosack
Definitely. But why add the overhead over updating DNS/DHCP?

~~~
count
To always start with a clean environment. Who knows what crud is leftover.

A new job for a machine calls for a new OS install/etc.

------
brryant
This is ridiculously unnecessary, and very confusing for new team members and
devops. Hostnames should be descriptive and help describe the machine's
location and responsibility in the network topology. Like webserver01a (nginx,
first machine in LB, us-east1a).

Sure it's not cutesy as "pikachu" or "bobasaur", but it will sure make your
nagios/copperegg dashboard make lot more sense. And when shit hits the fan you
won't think your servers are cute, despite their clever names.

~~~
jackalope
I (somewhat) disagree. Every _machine_ should have a unique hostname that has
nothing to do with its function. It should be in DNS and should be the name
you use to remotely manage it. Descriptive names should also be assigned in
DNS as functions are assigned to the device (either as additional A/AAAA
records or CNAMEs). This is flexible and scales well.

Many years ago, I originally assigned descriptive names to machines as I
deployed them, but this didn't scale well as we wanted to move services (and
their related hostames) to other machines. So I started assigning unique names
to machines, using famous figures born on the day of configuration (as in
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_12#Births](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_12#Births)).
That was 'cute' for a while, but now I just generate random 4-letter words and
pick the ones I like. The namespace is large enough for my purposes, the names
are short enough for easy typing (ssh fang), and everything aligns nicely in
text (zone files, inventory, etc.). In some cases, I've even replaced
descriptive names with TXT records in DNS associated with the unique name.

------
lamontcg
<function>-<environment>-XYnn.<DC Airport Code><Number>.company.com

foo-prod-1101.sea1.company.com foo-dev-1201.sea2.company.com foo-
test-2101.ord1.company.com

'foo' is whatever, and 'mysql' is bad while 'corp-db' is better as other
commentators mentioned.

for XYnn match X to the airport code of the datacenter, match Y to the
sequence number of the datacenter, and 'nn' is a 2-digit code for the number
in the cluster.

all short names are unique this way. all datacenter can have a mix of
prod/int/dev/test. you can use DNS name resolution search path to lookup
services like 'ldap' in your local datacenter.

don't use serial numbers. foo-123456789 is annoying for humans to use and will
get truncated with interesting results. i had a discussion one time on chat
with another engineer where i was looking at box '123' and he was looking at
box '789' and we were both getting real confused because it seemed like we
were on the same box... because we were...

also only use "company.com" as your domain for every server and desktop in
your company. if you need "company.co.uk" then it should only host websites
"www.company.co.uk" that points at VIPs and the servers behind that should all
still live in company.com. if you have windows boxes then setup a domain for
AD "ad.company.com" or "win.company.com" and let your domain servers own that
and setup proper DNS delegation from the parent.

------
peterwwillis
What is a hostname for?

We have IP addresses. They are unique numbers that will always resolve to one
unique machine, on which a network service exists that we want to talk to. We
use the hostname to refer to the unique instance, and a URI's protocol name to
refer to the service we want.

smtp. ntp. www. ftp. These are all short names that work great at expressing
both _what_ and _where_ the service you want is, under your domain. But what
if you have more than one? is it www2? ntp4? ftp3? which host/service do I
want?

Context is everything. Your hostnames should be a representation of what you
want to access, assuming a service with a default port. Instead of www2, www-
devel. Instead of mysql255, mysql-qa-dev-ext. These are contexts that are
specific to what you want, not just random identifiers you can use to pinpoint
an exact thing.

Renaming hosts is a pain. It should be minimized, which is why CNAMEs are
useful. If you can, try to give teams DNS control over the records pointing to
the hosts they manage, so they can control them without waiting for the DNS
admin to put a change through in a week. Make DNS changes work automatically
and immediately (trust me, it's perfectly doable even in large environments).
In most cases, you don't really need a host's name changed, you just need a
CNAME to the new host you want to use.

------
wazoox
In my company we're using musical instrument names for machines. Bass
instruments are servers, treble instruments are laptops, and medium ones are
desktops.

------
mapgrep
A well-known compute cluster at Berkeley created hostnames after types of
disasters:

    
    
      -tsunami
      -apocalypse
      -famine
      -avalanche
      -hailstorm
      -lightning
      -heatwave
      -locusts
      -tornado
      -fallingrocks (<-- my favorite)
      

Interestingly, though run on a shoestring, this proved to be one of the most
reliable set of servers on campus. I guess the disaster naming was a sort of a
reverse jinx.

------
pizzeys
To add a little counterweight to the 'should you give cute names' discussion -
there is at least one reason why cute names are a good idea. I work for a web
host, and our servers are named after musicians. It's a lot more likely on the
phone that if I ask a customer which box they're on, they'll remember Hendrix
or Prince or Buckethead over web-london-534.

------
Theodores
Imagine that some mystery virus has taken down or infected several boxes on
your network and management want to know exactly what has gone on. In this
scenario things are pretty sober and you really don't want to have anyone
asking why the computers are named after some characters from a TV show or
pretentious Greek myth characters. They won't see the funny side of it (if
there is a funny side).

It is therefore much better to have important network machines and kit named
in a logical manner, e.g. location-purpose-number.

As for what people have on their own desks, some people might detest whatever
your cutesy name scheme is and be irked at having to use a machine called
'jigglypuff' just because they really never liked Teenage Mutant Ninja
Turtles. They might also not really take to their workstation being
impersonal, e.g. 'ldn-gfx-23'. Hence, on the desktop let people have a machine
name of their choosing.

~~~
philwelch
Or the desktop hostname could be "employeelogin-desktop".

------
xenophonf
If I may put forth a slice of my personal philosophy, it's that silly host
names have ruled naming conventions long enough. I much prefer boring but
logical descriptors that help my network self-document: whether simple codes
useful in small environments (like "file01") or more complex schemes suitable
for large-scale computing (e.g., "masip150ntvirt" or "cin-me-exch-01"). With
the right scheme, 15 characters can tell you a lot about the location,
ownership, configuration, and purpose of a particular computer. The cutesy
naming conventions do nothing to help admins do their jobs or - in my opinion
- actively get in the way.

------
aclevernickname
Transformers.

AlphaTrion is the PDC, A-3 is the BDC/SDC. Iacon is the SQL machine
(VectorSigma is the name of the LVM pool).
OmegaSupreme/Metroplex/FortressMaxiums are the gateways. Gestalts (Defensor,
Computron, Superion) are used for the SANs and any other clusters.

Considering we try to be good guys, we only allow Autobot names for
workstations. Starfire, Starscream, Punch-Counterpunch, and other fence
sitters are not allowed. I lobbied for Wheelie to be included in that list,
but was overruled by others.

[EDIT] I could see how this might have limitations on scale, but we haven't
hit those limits internally, so it doesn't affect me yet. :)

------
shocks
I use elements. Machine with IP 192.168.1.x gets the element with atomic
number x as it's hostname. :)

[http://computernamer.com](http://computernamer.com) is good too.

Routers are named after species of penguin!

~~~
sneak
You can set up CNAMEs for their atomic symbols, too, to save typing.

------
mstrem
Amazing!

At my company: For machines where usually you should NOT log in we use:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distilleries_in_Scotlan...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_distilleries_in_Scotland)

That is because they are so hard to spell! You really need to put the effort
into it (e.g. Bruichladdich)

For the ones you should be logging into we use the most popular out of:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Home_appliance_brands](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Home_appliance_brands)

Which also fits in well with what the machines do... number crunching!

~~~
NDT
Ha! Brilliant.

------
kcvv
I work for a large company that has multiple locations and sub business and
many buildings have multiple data centres. By looking at the name, we can tell
if its a prod / dev or a test server, location of the server ( city/building
code and DC number), generic function ( DB -database could be any type of db ,
FS- file server, etc ) and unique number. Pretty good to pinpoint the location
of the server globally but useless when you need to find out the exact
function. While our inventory system is kind of OK, keeping it updated is a
pain.

------
mevodig
An interesting tidbit; the list is compiled by Greg Ercolano, author of the
render queue software Rush[1], for which he received an Academy Award in
2011[2].

It's a great piece of software for the VFX/post-production industry, and he's
by far the best software vendor I've ever worked with.

[1] [http://seriss.com/rush/](http://seriss.com/rush/)

[2]
[http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2011/20110107.html](http://www.oscars.org/press/pressreleases/2011/20110107.html)

------
eksith
What a great set of lists! I had a sudden flashback to the days of the
"Beowulf Cluster of X" meme, but in all seriousness, my favorite used to be
towns I've lived in or visited, but that too is a bit cumbersome to remember
in a pinch sometimes.

These days, I go with colors - I usually get a handy 7 right from the start -
so I don't need to dig in too much. I've also gone with desserts or sweets and
I'm sure Android was a big inspiration (albeit subconsciously) for that.

------
kubov
My habit is to name machines after Star Wars planets /characters. But despite
fact that I already have a established pattern it's often struggle to come up
with a name.

------
CraigJPerry
I think I've gone full circle on hostnames. Cute -> functional -> boring semi
serially assigned.

It doesn't matter is my conclusion. where I work we have the remnants of about
5 different naming schemes living side by side (very big environment) and
we're not missing out our gaining a thing.

We always resort to some external db (Sometimes just a spreadsheet) to lookup
particular hosts based on whatever today's criteria is.

TL;DR it's a distraction. Don't waste time on it.

------
peckrob
We used to use Marvel characters until our setup got too big. Now it's
(datacenter)-(type (web, proxy, db, etc))(number). So, sfo-proxy1, for
example.

~~~
tzs
Outgrowing Marvel characters is a sign of good growth. Marvel says they have
7000 characters, and that count might exclude characters that just had one
minor appearance.

~~~
peckrob
We reached a point where it was just becoming painful to keep track of them -
what a server did and where it was located. When you only have a handful of
machines at one location, it's not a big deal. But once that number grows, and
especially if spans multiple data centers, cute or geeky naming schemes tend
to fall apart.

"Wait, was Magneto the master DB or the NFS server? Did we move DB off there?
Is it in Atlanta, or San Francisco, or Phoenix?"

Eventually we reached a point where we had a spreadsheet mapping hostnames to
architecture functions and physical locations. We realized that, even though
our naming scheme was cool, it wasn't going to scale much further.

------
eCa
I use European mountain passes, like Stelvio [1] or Veleta [2].. I don't have
many servers.

At work though it's all business; purpose, environment, number, etc.

[1]
[http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=passo%20stelvio](http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=passo%20stelvio)

[2]
[http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=pico%20veleta](http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=pico%20veleta)

------
alexkus
Viruses were a favourite for a while (Hanta, Ebola, ...)

We had a 'bad idea' theme once which included:-

    
    
        port23
        dotat
    

But my favourite for one of our build machines and appeared in -version output
of our product was sigsegv.

I've settled on the elements with atomic number as last octet and the handy
shorthands, but that's for home dev network.

For company stuff they get named by function/env/counter.

------
darklajid
Ah, but that's obviously outdated: 'Nine planets and their moons'.. The RFC
linked in the current top comment looks neat though!

------
binarymax
Sweet list. Phonetic Alphabet is a good one - it has the typing superpower of
striking first letter then <tab> for instant autocomplete.

~~~
lost-theory
Until you have 27 hostnames.

~~~
scarlson
That's when we go Greek, say hello to α.

~~~
T-hawk
But you get a collision right on the first element. Alpha leads off both the
phonetic alphabet and Greek alphabet. Delta also collides.

------
jbpadgett
I posted about the hostnames topic in detail showing the difference between
ephemeral and persistent hosts. See the post here:
[http://padgeblog.com/2012/10/28/hostnames-in-the-dynamic-
inf...](http://padgeblog.com/2012/10/28/hostnames-in-the-dynamic-
infrastructure-world/)

------
lightstalker
My old university used birds (Round Robin access via the "aviary"), noble
gasses, music genres.

Myself, I use types of alcohol.

------
jaytaylor
I've always liked the ElasticSearch node names, they tend to be quite
interesting and fun:
[https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/blob/master/s...](https://github.com/elasticsearch/elasticsearch/blob/master/src/main/resources/config/names.txt)

------
NAFV_P
In the book "The History of Farting", an A-Z of different farts are described.
Great for a laugh, but I doubt they would make good hostnames. You would be
too busy laughing at the fact that the "J-curve fart" only exists
theoretically, while your co-workers would be attempting to ignite theirs.

------
GeneralMayhem
At my university, we had a small Beowulf cluster set up for when what we
wanted was to play with distributed processing (there was another, much more
powerful and better managed, cluster for jobs that actually needed to get
done). Naturally, we used names of kings and heroes from Beowulf.

------
seandougall
I don't typically manage hostnames, but I use planets from the Hitchhiker's
Guide to the Galaxy for removable drives.

Unrelated: if you use the time measurement list for hostnames, or anything
else that other people have to type, please for the love of God spell
"millennium" correctly.

------
peterbmarks
Planets mentioned in Star Wars is a good source (if you include books)
although some can be hard to spell.

~~~
rootbear
In Ancient Times, Industrial Light and Magic was on Usenet, and maybe the
Internet, via a system named dagobah.

I worked in a computer graphics group that used artist names, like vermeer,
escher, davinci, etc. My system was bonestell. In another group I was in, we
used names of dances, like bolero, foxtrot, tango, etc. The guy who suggested
bolero was thinking of Bo Derek, but I took the idea of dance names and ran
with it. My system was tarantella, which was hard enough to spell that people
stayed off of it.

At home, I don't follow a pattern, but I have used names from "A Wrinkle in
Time". My first quad core linux system was called tesseract and my Windows box
was camazotz. I've always like the names of the earliest computers like ENIAC,
EDSAC, UNIVAC, etc., so I named my Mac Pro prozac. I've considered naming my
two raspberry pis colossus and guardian...

------
codfrantic
An admin in a research lab where I was an intern had used negative emotions as
a naming scheme. Anger Despair Fear etc. until someone on his day off created
a machine called 'lol'. I think I noticed all the previous hostnames in his
face when he found out about that one...

------
shioyama
I've been using names from the Mr. Men series of books, so e.g. tickle,
grumpy, topsyturvy, daydream. Easy to remember because the characters are each
so unique and different, and gives each machine its own personality: "Oh crap,
grumpy is acting up again", etc.

------
ahsanulhaque
I've been naming mine after Asimov's Foundation Universe planets. Solaria,
Trantor etc.

------
nephorider
I used to go with "theme" name like wine oriented (chardonnay, merlot...) But
after a while it gets confusing to remember which machine does what and switch
to more "functional" names like "worker01, worker02, db01..."

~~~
kijin
If you're geeky enough about your theme, you could use theme-based names that
are also functional. For example, all the wines are application servers, all
the beers are DB servers, etc.

------
tantalor
Google Sets might a good way to automatically generate a list like this,

[http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/11/google-sets-
still-a...](http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2012/11/google-sets-still-
available.html)

------
mbesto
Famous cyclists names here! Gilbert, ulrich, and armstrong (we replaced
armstrong recently)

~~~
whalesalad
That's unfortunate. Despite the way that Armstrong situation went down there's
no doubt he's still an excellent cyclist and athlete.

------
mentalbastille
I once worked for a telecommunications company that used condom brands for
internal server host names. Makes me wonder if there are any other major
companies that use somewhat inappropriate names for their non-client-facing
equipment.

------
andyhmltn
Might use this in future! I wrote a script to generate mine when they are
provisioned: [https://github.com/andyhmltn/frosty-
meadow](https://github.com/andyhmltn/frosty-meadow)

------
rdl
I like using weird names but having them also be unique by first character.

------
sneak
Both runes and letters of the tengwar were patterns that I recall Pair
Networks used in the 90s, and I always thought those were cool.

I do love the idea of elements though, with their atomic symbols as CNAMEs.

------
jbrooksuk
We use Breaking Bad references.

* Heisenberg is our Hypervisor server. Running everything.

* Combo is our MySQL database.

* Ehrmantraut is our Git server.

* Skyler is our build server.

Basically that. It's a bit of fun. There are 5 of us in the web team who all
watched BB.

------
robotmlg
My university used to have their CS lab machines named after breakfast
cereals, soups, and pastas. Last year they switched to Unix commands,
programming languages, and design patterns.

------
chandraonline
I use the house names of westeros (game of thrones) for all my hostnames in my
home network. Its a lot more fun mounting a drive from winterfell or streaming
movies from kingslanding.

------
TheLoneWolfling
I've been using elements myself for my home network.

(With one pseudo-exception: my first laptop was protium, my previous
deuterium, my current tritium. Next one will probably be hydrogen.)

~~~
shocks
Nice! I use elements but I pick the element based on IP address and atomic
number.

So 192.168.1.30 is zinc. :)

------
mpalme
Another idea: sunken ships. Comes in handy if a server is down.

------
IgorPartola
I like Harry Potter characters. There are lots of names in those books and the
lists are readily available. Lots of them are unambiguous in English which is
nice.

------
cupcake-unicorn
Nice! I did this without being aware that it was a good thing to do, and with
a small network. I chose Finnish goddess names, some of which got pretty
unwieldy...

------
ScotterC
I remember recognizing at CMU that the many of the computers were named after
Phish songs. Always enjoyed working at 'weekapaug'

------
Hovertruck
We used to use palindromes. It was a terrible idea.

------
astoltzf
For sports fans -- historic player names for a particular team. Like the
Phillies.. ashburn, bunning, carlton, dykstra .... incaviglia.

------
angelortega
I've always used demonic names: belial, azazel, asmodeo, belcebu, astarot,
kali, oni, behemoth, baal... (they are spanishized).

------
Brajeshwar
Lord of the Rings?

~~~
Fomite
Where I work, the number of tickets filed about the speed of 'Shadowfax'
always makes me chuckle.

------
neur0mancer
Someone should try to use these a source for guessing of subdomain for a large
number of domain (probably fetched from Google).

------
oskarth
I use philosophers on my personal machines: thales, aristotle, plato, etc.

On VPSes I like names like London<optional digit>PROD/DEV.

------
friggeri
My personal machines are named after characters from Shakespeare's The
Tempest: Caliban, Prospero, Miranda, Ariel, etc.

------
philamonster
I typically use favorite cars from the Gran Turismo series; yellowbird,
trueno, skyline etc. or characters from Quake 3.

------
imslavko
I know RethinkDB guys give every node in a cluster a name of one of Dota
Heroes. That's something I can remember :)

------
coolnow
My personal machines (including phone, tablet etc) used to be called Snake,
Zero, Ocelot, Boss.

Guess which is my favourite game series.

------
kmfrk
I believe it was the Disqus team who described using StarCraft names divided
into either races or units vs. buildings.

------
mbrameld
I use characters from Stephen King's Dark Tower series. Roland, Eddie, Jake,
Oy, Susannah, Cuthbert, Alain, etc.

------
yaffle
I,be seen IKEA furniture as hostnames. Advantage: Easy access through IKEA
website and continuously new names.

------
dhughes
Days of the week could get a bit confusing and possibly creating a "Who's on
First" situation.

------
crowell
I use locations from the Zelda universe.

my current machines are

lakehylia, lostwoods, termina, koholint, skyloft, deathmountain, minishwoods

------
amarsahinovic
I use Star Trek ship classes and names: enterprise, defiant, voyager, galaxy,
sovereign, intrepid etc.

------
8ig8
We've been using Seinfeld characters. It makes me smile when I ssh to
Peterman, Puddy, Morty...

~~~
teddyh
That could bite you if you happen to start to work with someone with that
name. Therefore, RFC 1178 recommmends not naming hosts using names of people.

------
fareesh
We use character codenames from the Metal Gear Solid universe. Ocelot,
Octopus, Raven, Wolf, etc.

------
jevinskie
I like using the chemical elements.

------
stevewillows
For my home (laptop, three towers, an rpi, NAS, and mobile devices) I use four
letter foods.

------
rajington
we use periodic table elements for releases, we even have "isotopes". version
numbers perfectly match to atomic numbers, and they all have abbreviations.
it's a great way to learn the periodic table as well.

------
protomyth
The place I'm currently at uses Dakota words, but that's a local thing.

------
spacehunt
We use Japanese food names... unadon, maguro, gyoza, yakitori, tonkatsu...
mmmmm

------
morazow
I have used names from fantasy books. Shire, Mordor, North, Dorne, Vale ..

------
leif
Characters from Firefly, for my home network. All short and memorable.

------
olefoo
eh. I had that at a previous employer. I used volcano names because there's a
fair number of them and they sometimes explode. ( the graphite server was
called seismograph... ).

------
anaphor
scientists make good hostnames, e.g. Sagan, Feynman, Darwin, etc...

------
bluedino
Someone decided to name ours based on specs. DUAL2800, DUAL3000...

------
dschulz
`kill -l` gives a nice list. I'm writing this from sigsegv.

------
Vektorweg
(Sid Meier's) Alpha Centauri character and city names.

------
matiasb
Any slackware fan using darkstar-1, darkstar-2 and so on?

------
morgante
I'm a big fan moons, with planets as subnets.

------
akandiah
I personally use elements of the periodic table.

------
kilink
Godzilla monsters

------
lfcode
Easy one: Star Wars planets

------
deviltry
I use World of Warcraft's server names:
[http://www.wowwiki.com/Realms_list](http://www.wowwiki.com/Realms_list)

Like Aegwynn, AeriePeak, Alterac, Arathi, etc.

