
RFC 1178 – Choosing a name for your computer (1990) - adambyrtek
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1178
======
RcouF1uZ4gsC
This reminds me of the Pets vs Cattle analogy
[https://www.engineyard.com/blog/pets-vs-
cattle](https://www.engineyard.com/blog/pets-vs-cattle)

With a pet, you obsess over the name and meaning of the name. With cattle, as
long as names don't collide or cause problems, you couldn't care less about
the name.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Depends how you mean that; I would rather a machine be named prod-app-web-7
than af74b9c. At least mark the cattle by breed!

~~~
SteveNuts
That goes against the paradigm. I prefer that my hostnames are ambiguous, that
way I'm forced to write tools to automate administrative tasks.

If I know the hostname I or my team will be tempted to make one-off changes,
breaking the whole "cattle" idea.

~~~
deathanatos
It is still helpful to have decent names even if you're treating your machines
like "cattle" instead of like "pets".

Inevitably, some bug will occur, and in my experience, it usually happens to
occur on a machine (rather than all of them at once; I'm not saying this
machine is _special_ — the bug _could_ have happened on any of them, and
likely exists on all of them because they're all running the same code, but
this particular machine ended up being the lucky one to serve that slightly
unusual request).

Getting in and debugging the state of that machine, pulling logs, directing a
coworker to look at CPU detail "frobnozz", etc. is all easier if I can easily
speak or type out the machine's name. "3.dev.microservice" is much easier to
type/speak than say, an IP address, an EC2 instance ID, etc.

(I _fully_ agree on not making one-off changes, and not treating machines as
pets. But I think that even after that, decent naming has a place.)

And even with cattle, the other way, I still think it's useful for the name to
provide _some_ information. I.e., 3.prod.microservice being the third or
fourth instance of the production setup of "microservice" is better than say,
some random entry from the periodic table of elements.

~~~
mulmen
If you have to say the name of an instance you already lose.

~~~
semanticist
If you do anything to the point of dogma, you've lost. Being a good sysadmin
is all about being pragmatic.

------
Pxtl
I stopped reading halfway through the shop example. When you move the machine
out of the shop and give it a completely new role, rename it. I call my
webserver webserver.

I never get why there's such a huge gap between admins and programmers on
this. Programmers have sane, intelligent naming conventions beaten into them,
and yet when I ask a sysadmin what server the Wiki is running on, half the
time the answer is something like "legolas". That name would never make it
through my code review.

~~~
sdrothrock
> I call my webserver webserver.

Agreed. Nothing confuses me more than finding a network with a bunch of
machines named for roles that they don't fulfill.

Even more infuriating is when you have a network like that, but the new
machines have names that refer to the old ones -- so for example, the
webserver may be "webserver," but the new replacement may be "real-webserver"
and then the replacement of that may be "real-webserver-replacement."

~~~
Pxtl
Imho, there's nothing wrong with throwing a number on the end to denote our
3rd webserver. And obviously, the name is only its primary function. If a
sever wears 2 hats, maybe the secondary function isn't in the name. That's
still more infromative than "the git repo is on huitzilipotchtli".

~~~
KozmoNau7
I'm on laptop06, desktop06, phone06, printer02, htpc02 and nas01 at the
moment, incrementing the suffix when I replace a machine or add a new one.

I tack on "-linux", "-windows", "-android" and so on when appropriate.

------
toomanybeersies
My dad used to name computers after characters from Greek mythology. I took
the idea and name my computers and devices after Norse mythology.

You get some cool names, but there is a fairly critical downside in that a lot
of people struggle with spelling the names. Most people probably can't spell
Odysseus correctly on the first attempt, and it's even harder to spell
Jormungandr correctly.

I think that cutesy names like this are fine for personal use, but for
commercial use you're better of using a more standardised schema for naming.

Another place where companies seem to love cutesy names is meeting rooms.
Maybe it's because management wants to sound interesting, or maybe they just
like painting bike sheds, but often they like to give non-standard names to
meeting rooms, like names of native birds or something else that doesn't
describe the room at all. It just makes it hard to remember which room is
which. How am I meant to know which room is the Tui room, and which is the Moa
room?

Either name them by location (e.g. Second Floor, NW), or by distinguishing
feature, at one job we had a meeting room with no windows, so we called it the
bunker.

~~~
Jaruzel
I actually do this for my personal servers (I'm not your Dad btw).

Two decades ago when I only had a handful of servers it seemed a great idea to
name them after Greek Gods (on the Zeus family line). I actually stole the
concept from the DEC VAXcluster I was working with at the time. Fast forward
to present day and everything being virtualised, it's trivial to boot up a new
server from a template, and naming each new one has become a massive pain. As
I apply a no-reuse rule, I find myself delving deeper and deeper into Greek
mythology. I also try to match the name with the purpose, so the God of
Messaging (Hermes) is my Mail Server, Zeus is the Hyper-V host for all his
offspring etc.

It all made sense at conception, but now I've got ~40 servers doing various
things, and half the time I can't remember which is which. :(

However...

In a professional environment[1] I have lost SO many hours in pointless
'naming convention' arguments. Everyone has a different view as to how it
should be done. My view is to pick the defining characteristics of the
servers; Is location important? Are they single role servers? Are they lab or
production? Do they belong to specific part of the business?

For example: 'LDNTCADSP001' breaks down into
{location}{datacentre}{role}{lab/prod}{unit-number}

* Don't use wasted character like dashes as depending on your systems you've only got X characters to play with.

* Sysadmins should always be able to identify at a glance what the server does, and where it is _without_ having to fire up a CMDB.

\--

[1] I've held senior roles in several major global Banks, where my teams
managed several hundred servers on average. So this is a real-world viewpoint.

~~~
XorNot
LDNTCADSP001 - I hate names like this.

It's untypable on a command line since you have to shoot all over the
keyboard, and it probably won't auto-complete until you get to the last
number.

There's other subtle problems to: its not sparse enough for the same reason.
You're putting a lot of stock in an operator always seeing the right sequence
of numbers, especially if your fleet grows and you now have a LDNTCADSP101 and
LDNTCADSP110 for example.

They're also unpronounceable - you can't communicate them to other people
verbally quickly or reliably.

The best thing we've currently done at my work is assign single-use mnemonic
names to all the servers (and, I'm pushing for it to be everything) - so we
have "subsidy", "until", "wedding", "opulent" as server names. Easy to
remember when you're debugging, easy to say, and a sparse namespace - you're
exceedingly unlikely to mistake one for the other, and they'll autocomplete
easily. It plays right into the human associative memory too.

~~~
JBlue42
>They're also unpronounceable - you can't communicate them to other people
verbally quickly or reliably.

This is my recent life as I started a (hopefully temporary) phone support role
and the place I work has desktops with names like that but also, inexplicably,
using all the hard letters in to hear well over the phone.

Ex: HPDHHPDEDPD-TS

Thanks goodness the folks I'm talking to can use a semblance of the phonetic
alphabet.

~~~
Jaruzel
It's 'horses for courses' \- what works for one organisation might not work
for another. Scale is also an issue; you can't use clever word based names
when you have 50,000 desktops on the estate.

Again, in my view (based on several years as a support monkey at the beginning
of my career), desktops/laptops should be named based on their asset tags,
LT891334 or DT993115 etc. That way, when you ask the user 'what's the machine
name' and they have no idea, you can say 'read me the number that's on that
big white sticker on the lid'.

~~~
JBlue42
>Again, in my view (based on several years as a support monkey at the
beginning of my career), desktops/laptops should be named based on their asset
tags, LT891334 or DT993115 etc. That way, when you ask the user 'what's the
machine name' and they have no idea, you can say 'read me the number that's on
that big white sticker on the lid'.

I wasn't disagreeing with you at all and I really like your solution. I was
trying to provide an example of desktops I deal with now that are sometimes
impossible to distinguish on the phone without going full NATO alphabet.

------
linsomniac
I used to do sysadmin consulting, and one of our clients had a new director of
IT come in. One of his first orders of business was to have us rename all the
hosts (around 100 of them) from role-based names (db01, web01, storage01) to
city names.

So when an alert came in at 3am that "mulhouse" is down, you had to know that
Mulhouse is a French city _AND_ France denotes database machines. And the city
names were often fairly obscure, of the 100 names, I had only heard of a
handful of them. "Is that name Icelandic or Finnish?"

That director of IT didn't last long.

------
dpark
When I worked at Yahoo, all personal machines were given a simple two-
dictionary-word name. e.g. My desktop was sawbeauty. I always thought this was
pretty elegant. All the names were pretty short. There was minimal ambiguity.
And it scaled really well.

~~~
EvanAnderson
An aside re: Yahoo -- Somewhere I have my website logs from the 1995-96
timeframe. I'll have to try to dig 'em up. I remember the day the site got
listed on Yahoo, however. I got hits from machines with names like
"scabies.yahoo.com", "ratbastard.yahoo.com", and "srinija.yahoo.com". There
were some others, but I can't remember them (scurvy, maybe?). (I remember
reading the Wired article about Yahoo in '96, seeing the name "Srinija
Srinivasan", and figuring out what that last hostname meant.)

~~~
dpark
That’s well before my time at Yahoo. By the time I joined, their IT group
preinstalled and named every device with a two-word nonoffensive moniker. By
then they weren’t giving out 3rd level domains anymore either. :)

------
relyks
This doesn't exactly abide by the RFC but I name all my computers after dead
rockstars e.g. "david-bowie", "george-harrison", "jimi-hendrix", "elvis-
presley" It's become a tradition of mine :) The lab computers at Rutgers use
design patterns, unix commands, and programming languages for the names:
[https://report.cs.rutgers.edu/nagiosnotes/iLab-
machines.html](https://report.cs.rutgers.edu/nagiosnotes/iLab-machines.html)

~~~
fiatjaf
I use dead Austrian economists: "mises", "menger", "hayek", "lachmann",
"kirzner".

~~~
cat199
... but what if supply can't keep up with demand??

------
andy_ppp
A guy I worked with would name the machines based on the atomic number of the
last part of the IP address, i.e. 192.168.1.2 would be helium.

Eventually it becomes really annoying, don’t do this.

~~~
oceanman888
Why is it annoying? Isn't it easy to tell the IP address?

~~~
freeflight
Only if you know the periodic table blind, but this could be a good approach
to actually learn it. I'm just not that sure many people want to learn
chemistry while administering the IT.

~~~
oceanman888
Hummmm, in Asian we can't graduate high school without memorizing the whole
damn thing.

~~~
isostatic
What a useful skill...

~~~
apexalpha
My High school forced 2 dead languages on me (Latin, Greek) for 2 years.

Think I'd rather have the periodic table.

~~~
isostatic
I suspect people living in Athens may be rather upset by the assertion they
don't speak Greek!

(Yes, I assume you meant ancient greek)

High School teaches tons of crap. I spent 5 years doing French, and while I
remember "J'ai joue le foot" (which was a lie), that's about it, I could pick
up more French in 3 months worth of weekly evening classes.

Even the French I know doesn't help - I went to a kiosk at Gare du Nord,
having just got off the train from Brussels. "Je Voudrai une cafe sil-vou-
plait". "Three-fifty" comes the response. Bloody French.

High School languages in the UK (and other English speaking contries) would be
far better giving a smörgåsbord of the basics of French, German, Spanish,
Italian, Russian, Arabic, Mandarin, and Portugese. Being able to say "Hello,
good to meet you", "Thank you", "Excuse me, where are the toilets", "Could I
have the bill please", understand a few phrases (tickets please etc), and have
a fighting chance at reading and ordering from a menu, etc, in most countries
of the world would be very beneficial. 4 years, 2 languages per year. Perhaps
more important than the language specifics are the customs, even things like
composting train tickets,

(Of course with translate apps, map apps, etc the menu/map problem is going
away, but the customs and some language overview would go a long way - when
train tickets neet composting, when tipping is required (USA), not required
(most countries), and actually an insult (many far east places). Being able to
recognize which toilet to go in - W or F - is helpful).

Wider cultural education would be a massive benefit to Americans in general,
who on the whole don't get the chance to travel that say Brits do.

------
rootbear
I'm a fan of the names of the "First Generation" computers like ENIAC, EDVAC,
ILLIAC, etc. My Raspberry Pi honors Pi inventor Eben Upton and is named
EBENAC, the Economical British Educational Networked ARM Computer.

~~~
mynameishere
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MANIAC_I)

 _Metropolis chose the name MANIAC in the hope of stopping the rash of silly
acronyms for machine names,[2] although von Neumann may have suggested the
name to him._

------
dweekly
There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming
things, and off-by-1 errors.

One thing to keep in mind here is that naming should be done with a lifetime
matching the thing being named. If a given machine might have many roles in
its lifetime, asset names ought be separate from role names. So calling a
_machine_ db2 might not be a good idea unless you have 100% confidence it will
only ever be a database machine.

So a62848 could be asset 62848, which then can have all kinds of exciting
metadata and services pointing to it that may change over the asset's lifetime
without needing to update the host name.

Baking metadata into a name is usually going to lead to sadness when later
attempting to rename.

(While I'm the product manager for Google's datacenter software team I'm not
speaking for Google here.)

~~~
e1ven
Great points!

One of the nice side effects of using the cloud is production systems don't
normally change name anymore.

I can name a machine db2, and if I don't need it anymore, it's quick to
destroy it, and create a new machine of the same size named appserver15.

------
excitom
It's kind of sad this task has mostly gone away for large datacenters, where
choosing names for the thousands of servers is impractical. h223-16-32a just
doesn't have same cachet as the carefully selected names.

~~~
rootbear
NASA has a rigid host naming scheme that is based on the center, the org code,
and the property tag number. Fortunately, we can use aliases, or I would go
mad.

------
xenophonf
This is my favorite naming scheme, although I usually skip the codenames and
assign functional names to everything:

[https://www.mnxsolutions.com/devops/a-proper-server-
naming-s...](https://www.mnxsolutions.com/devops/a-proper-server-naming-
scheme.html)

------
davidw
Interesting - the author, Don Libes, is also known for Expect:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Libes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Libes)

------
_emacsomancer_
With multiple computers on the same network, it's fun (if not productive) to
come up with names within a theme (e.g. characters from a novel, place names
from some country etc.)

~~~
fermienrico
I use elements from the periodic table. The ones that sound cool!

Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Neon, Tungsten, Helium, Sodium, etc

Wifi names are after noble gases.

PC hardware are all stable metals.

iPhone/iPad accessories are all non-metals.

and finally, random IOT devices are radioactive elements.

~~~
tonyarkles
Me too on the periodic table names, but with a bit of creativity related to
the machine too:

\- Helium - my Surface 3, because it's light

\- Lead - my heavy Linux laptop

\- Lithium - the Mac Mini I bought to keep from going crazy using a decade old
Macbook Pro for iOS development

\- Caesium - my Dell "workstation" Windows laptop, because I bought it to save
time (compared to running Windows + Visual Studio in a VM)

\- Uranium and Thorium - the beefy Xeon workstations that run a bunch of VMs
and things - named because they put out so much heat that they might be
radioactive

~~~
hashhar
It's quite funny that we share the host names Helium and Caesium. My Linux
machines are radioactive because I tinker with them a lot and am bound to
reinstall every few months.

~~~
tonyarkles
Heh, yeah, there's that too...

------
pdkl95
See RFC 2100 for additional commentary on naming host:

[https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2100](https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2100)

------
VectorLock
One shop I worked at briefly went with "female serial killers" for their
naming convention. So you can just imagine the type that worked there.

------
nivenhuh
Quote from RFC: "Just because a person is named "Don" doesn't mean he is the
ruler of the world (despite what the "Choosing a Name for your Baby" books
say)."

If only the RFC knew what we know now.

------
tomca32
I like following a naming theme. I used to be a ballet dancer so I use ballet
steps for my machine names: Enterlace, Revoltade, ... They are all single
words that are super uncommon outside of the ballet world

~~~
Arbalest
Good luck getting someone who is unfamiliar with those to spell it out from
sound alone. Though with the prevalence of text communication (not seen at the
time) this is less of a problem than when this was written.

~~~
jcranmer
I ended up with a scheme by accident that is hard both to spell and speak for
most people. I don't have many problems with names like mictlantecuhtli,
xolotl, or macuilxochitl (well, except for the fact that I can't pronounce
consonant final tl and end up with /təl/ instead), but I totally see why
others have problems with it.

On the plus side, if I ever get one of those "you have a virus" scam calls, I
can probably string the caller out for a while trying to get them to spell out
the name of the computer that supposedly has the virus...

------
scrumper
My family's machines at home are all named after fictional robots, names don't
get recycled when the boxes die which makes it a fun challenge when a new one
arrives. So far we've had:

johnnyfive marvin katya gerty kryten robbie

Doing our best to avoid dipping into Star Wars laziness. (And HAL is verboten
too.)

~~~
WorldMaker
I've been using "Words that start with Q" since High School and surprisingly
haven't recycled a name yet for a machine, and I've gone through nearly a
dozen or so.

quiddity quilt quasar quantum quack quiz...

It's funny how a silly naming rule like that winds up sticking for a couple
decades.

~~~
scrumper
Oh that's good. I hope you ban yourself from using dictionaries to help.

Our main constraint is that it has to be a robot that my wife, a devout sci-fi
sceptic, has heard of. Probably it would make more sense for her machines to
be named after obscure British Jacobeans and mine to be robots but since I've
paid for all of them, I get to choose.

------
protomyth
We went with Dakota (not Lakota) names for numbers. Admittedly we might have
skipped some of the longer names. Recently we added some named after color.
Every department was supposed to find a way to include the language somewhere.
[edit: servers only, PCs get names based on room / building]

------
chrissnell
I registered island.nu when the TLD launched. .nu was the first TLD that you
could register under that wasn't a com/net/org or my own country's TLD.

All of my machines are named after islands:

Mauritius Sable Padre Nauru Jarvis etc.

------
johannes1234321
Related: If you want to name things this Wiki has different proposals:
[http://namingschemes.com/](http://namingschemes.com/)

------
makach
yeah, when I proposed we change to more sensible names for our servers, our
admin asked for examples whereupon I answered "i.e. we could name them after
planets"

his face lights up and says "yeah! like planet01, planet02, planet03.."

------
sk5t
Some fun CMU computer cluster name themes from the past:

    
    
      * Prisons (statesville, graterford, etc.): Macs
      * Astronauts (resnik, white, aldrin): DECstations
      * Disasters (flood, famine, humanity?): More aged DECstations
      * Climates (tundra, steppe, island): SPARCstation 5s 
      * Characters of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's
      * Wood (elm, pine, smoke): Printers

~~~
scrumper
I had a personal SPARCstation 5 at university. I named it 'sparky'. I probably
could have done better.

~~~
zimpenfish
Long ago I had an IPX. It was called ... ipx.$domain. Then I got another one.
And it was called ... ipy.$domain.

You'll never guess what the third one was called...

~~~
sk5t
Bit nasty to name the machine after an obsolete layer 3 protocol, innit?

------
mugsie
personally, I _really_ hate the "name the machine something cute / funny / in
joke". In a previous company, everything was names after Italian towns, and
while the IT staff knew what "rome" was, the rest of use had issues
decyphering what the hell was happening.

This was applied to both VM hosts and VMs, so you had to remember that
"livigno" ran VMs x,y,z, and was actually in the backup DC.

A later company had a better scheme:

Hosts: <service>-<role><number>-<data center>-r<rack ID>-u<rack U location>

e.g.: nova-compute0042-uswest-rF20-u23L

VMs: <service>-<role><number>-<region>-az<availability zone>

e.g. designate-mdns009-uswest-az3

This really does help debuging issues at a glance (e.g. you can see that all
VMs in uswest az1 are down at a glance), or directing people to a failed node
(replace disk 5 in nova-compute0042-uswest-rF20-u23L is very clear what
machine needs maintenance - in the us west DC go to rack f20, and the left
hand blade in u23 needs disk 5 swapped).

~~~
XorNot
The need to overload hostnames like that to me just says you haven't got your
inventory system in order.

For the price of actually using my asset DB, my alerts can be sliced and diced
exactly by the datacentre/rack/whatever because I'm properly tagging
everything.

Whereas for all the times I've heard "oh we won't move servers and if we do
we'll re-image them..." just last month (and still ongoing) people have been
dragging racks between floors, plugging them in and that's it - so fixed names
like that get stuck.

~~~
mugsie
Sure - but from the easy of human pattern matching looking a list of hostnames
in a monitoring system without needing to click to a different page I think it
is worth it.

If you are in the habit of moving racks, then I would agree keeping it only in
an inventory system makes sense, but that also requires the asset system to be
updated when a rack moves - at which point changing a hostname (which can be
autogenerated by dhcp based on that system) an easy step to add.

------
gorbot
Somewhat dorky things like this are pretty common in computing and I love it!

------
EvanAnderson
There was an ISP / hosting provider in Dayton, OH, named "donet.com". For
years and years their DNS was available for public zone transfers and they had
wonderful computer names like powdered, glazed, chocolate, and my favorite,
dayold. (Looks like some of those names are still around, too, even after they
"rebranded"...)

------
Mononokay
I use space missions. Soyuz--MS-02 for the one I'm currently using.

------
MayeulC
The worst choice we've done in terms of host name was for our server at my
uni's robotics lab. The lab itself has a strong Tintin theme, and the various
computers continue this tradition, with the (french) names Tournesol, Milou,
and... Dupont for a random lab computer, while the production server got
Dupond (the english equivalents are Thomson and Thompson). While funny, this
isn't extremely practical, especially the first few months, while getting
accustomed to it.

Nowadays, we prefer to name them after something more meaningful, like
Archibald [Captain Haddock's first name, fitting for an Arch machine], Winry,
or Delphine (Windows and Debian, respectively). This makes easy to identify
the machine and its operating system, which I like including in the host name.

Overall, I find that having a clear theme helps (to know we are talking about
a computer's name), and clear rules for the naming scheme also help, both for
picking the name, and guessing its function/characteristics from the name.

I would definitely go with some DNS-based convention like the one @zrm
mentioned when having to manage bigger clusters or geographically disparate
pieces of equipment, though.

I would also disagree with something in this RFC: I don't mind tying a
hostname to the host function, as I usually reimage/reinstall the operating
system when changing it, making it easy to rename it. This also helps with
keeping everything modular enough that it can be quickly installed on a new
machine, and prevents "ossification" of the various configuration files. This
includes giving a replacement computer the same name as the one being
replaced.

Finally, when managing a truly dynamic cluster (computers that boot a PXE
image with little to no local storage, and take their jobs from a control
server), I don't even bother naming them, and will choose something semi-
random like the MAC address (even a link-local/DHCP address, or the md5 of one
of these). As those are temporary identifiers, they are managed dynamically,
and do not need to be remembered.

------
jessaustin
In the past I have used stringed instruments: "lute", "banjo", "dobro", etc.
Recently it seems I just have a single Linux box at each location, which
server is named "box".

------
zbik
My favorite theme was Japanese terms from the game Go (wei-qi). Joseki,
fuseki, sente. It was educational as well as distinctive. The spellings are
also easier than my other theme of Polish delicacies.

------
thesephist
I’ve been running through names of Greek and Roma deities for my machines,
which work super well. They can even be themed (all mobile / wireless clients
are named after dieties of death).

~~~
JasonFruit
Do you mean Roman or Roma? I know nothing of Roma folklore.

------
CaliforniaKarl
For the FarmShare cluster, systems in version 1 of the cluster were named
corn/barley/rye plus some number, for login/compute/GPU systems.

The current version of the cluster is named rice/wheat/oat plus a number. It
lets us combine some originality in with automatic naming.

We’re already thinking about what to do for the next generation. And when we
move all of the administrative systems (like the job schedulers) into VMs,
we’re thinking of calling the underlying physical hardware quadrotriticale.

------
danaliv
On the subject of themes, I’ve always wanted to name a collection of computers
with genericized trademarks: like bikini, popsicle, kleenex, or my favorite,
thermos!

------
nurettin
>> For example, a distributed database had been built on top of several
computers

This is 1990, amazing awareness of what computers are capable of already.

------
emmelaich
Name things that are the least likely to be misleading.

i.e. the thing least likely to change. Which is almost always the physical
location. eg. usa-sf-23

------
Turing_Machine
One exception where it's actually pretty useful to have a location-specific
name: printers (or any other resource where people really need to know the
physical location of the device, like DVD burners, 3D printers, or whatever).
It's nice to know what room to go to to find your printout. :-)

Of course then you do have to make sure to rename it if it gets moved.

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wiseleo
There are enough Pokemon to name my servers. ;)

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johnhenry
I don't think this is the original post that I remember from years ago, but
the StarCraft convention has always intrigued me:
[https://slifty.com/2011/03/starcraft-
network/](https://slifty.com/2011/03/starcraft-network/)

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TheAceOfHearts
I use mythological gods when naming my devices. For example: loki, odin, thor,
and zeus. I like short and easy to remember names.

What naming conventions do people use for storage devices? I recently created
a zfs pool and ended up reusing the computer name, but it becomes a bit
awkward to say you're opening foo on foo.

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aetherspawn
I have been using starship names from Star Trek since basically forever.

enterprise, voyager, relativity, defiant etc

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tragomaskhalos
Have worked on a cluster where an explicit prohibition in these guidelines was
violated ! The admin decided to name machines after quarks, hence "up",
"down", "charm" etc. Can't say it caused any particular issues.

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jjuhl
I've used norse mythology (using danish versions of names) in the past. The
DNS servers were "odin" and "mimer". Webservers were "valhalla" and "udgaard",
the DHCP server was "Yggdrasil". Etc.

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sshine
I encountered an otherwise ordinary pizza place yesterday that had all its
pizzas renamed after stellar objects (stars, star signs, galaxies).

Quite amusing except my internal dictionary of well-known pizza names had to
be replaced by a linear lookup.

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howard941
I used to name my pets after my pets. Thing is, the boxes outlived the
animals.

At that point the names become memorials and it's nice to ssh into them. The
only glitch so far is it's difficult to decommission the roles.

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crgwbr
For as long as I can remember, I’ve used ship names from Battlestar Galactica,
which are mostly just names from Greek mythology. Galactica, Cerberus, Triton.
Pegasus, Valkyrie, Celestus, Prometheus, etc.

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mholt
> _For example, amorphous names such as rivers, mythological places and other
> impossibilities are very suitable. ( "earth" is not yet a domain name.)_

This'll probably be changing soon...

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harrygallagher4
The first time I rented a server I was looking around my room to think of a
cool hostname and saw “yavapai” on my backpack. Since then I’ve just been
using names of Native American tribes.

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protomyth
Also, don’t use automatically generated names based on a person’s name without
a review. Sharon Hiterman[1] will not be amused.

1) not a real person, but a real family name paired with a common first name

~~~
jlgaddis
We did this at a former employer and had a librarian with the username
"scatt".

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rietta
Neat. I use the names of moons, like Europa, Io, Callisto, etc.

~~~
Turing_Machine
If you needed to name a _whole bunch_ of machines, you could use the list of
named minor planets ("asteroids"):

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_named_minor_planets:_A](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_named_minor_planets:_A)

1,479 just in the letter A.

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kiddico
I've always named mine after Red vs Blue characters.

Laptop=sheila. Desktop=tex. Server=lopez. Names are recycled when the machine
is replaced.

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murbard2
> Random strings are inappropriate for the same reason that they are so useful
> for passwords. They are hard to remember.

"useful" :)

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tjalfi
I use uncommon female names that are at least six characters in length.

Cirocco - from John Varley's Gaean trilogy

Lorelei - from the Styx song

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codezero
Interesting how much of this doesn’t apply in the configuration based cloud
world, and how much of it does :)

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oceanman888
The Japanese lab I was at name all the machines by Pokemon names. we get to
pick which Pokemon we want.

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tambourine_man
The second hard problem, naming things

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foota
Fwiw I don't think this advice applies well to virtual machines created by
things like docker.

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lisper
When I was at Google I named my machine Myriad. No one seemed to appreciate
the subtlety. ;-)

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wemdyjreichert
I use rivers of hell from Greek mythology. Cocytus, Acheron, Lethe,
Phlegathon, Styx.

~~~
acheron
Unsurprisingly, I've done this in the past.

~~~
wemdyjreichert
Username checks out

------
HenryBemis
I was really looking to see if it was April 1st thing back at the time. The
RFC was so funny it reminded me of standard random number = 4 [1].

[1]: [https://www.xkcd.com/221/](https://www.xkcd.com/221/)

