I’ve ended up with a number of machines on my network, and a need to name them all in a somewhat logical way. For several years I had them named after the planets, which worked well until the PCs for myself, my girlfriend, servers and Raspberry Pi’s quickly summed up to more than the eight planets. I’ve broadened it somewhat to include any Greek/Roman mythological figure, but the system is definitely not as clean as it used to be.
Do you have a coordinated naming theme for your machines?
You must log in or register to comment.
Every machine is named after what it does (although I do 1337-ify the names, because I’m still a late 90s IRC teen at heart). If you’ve ever been onboarded into a sysadmin role where all the machines are named with whatever whimsical naming scheme each department chose, you’ll fast develop a visceral hatred for non-descriptive naming schemes. The fifth time you get a ticket saying something like ‘Hedwig is down’ and you have to go crawling through three layers of linked files on SharePoint to find what and where ‘Hedwig’ is, you’ll be ready to beat the person who named it to death, and that attitude tends to persist to your home naming scheme :p
So more of a “cattle” than “pet” approach in general?
The fifth time you get a ticket saying something like ‘Hedwig is down’
If only there was an excellent database to store where Hedwig.bthl4.sea.wa.goliath.corp was and maybe include an alias so you know it’s NNTP5.goliath.corp also.
I shall invent one. It shall replicated and synchronize quickly. It shall interface and accept changes and share data. It will be simple to query so everyone can use it. I shall call it DNS . If people get snippy, I shall next invent an HS record.
Learn to use the tools, man. It’ll help you adhere to a 40-year-old RFC on naming things.
I’ll get right on rearchitecting the dns infrastructure of a large sprawling corporation, with mountains of technical debt from decades of acquisitions where they just mashed shit together. I’m sure that project will get approved.
Don’t be condescending, man.
Yes, if you’ve built the network from scratch that works. Retrofitting it into an existing network however is a massive piece of work when you don’t have that single source of truth to start with however. On networks I’ve built sensibly, I’ll happily give people whatever CNAME they want to refer to their machine, but the machines actual name is descriptive, not the other way round.
I am 100% with you on this. At work the name should instantly tell me everything I need to know about the system at a glance.
Rfc1178 be damned.
Depending on the size of the machine I’ll call it big/large/huge/small/Lil then a human name like John. BigJohn is my main server and hopefully one day he can get an upgrade and become large John.
This, but it’s all suggestive names, such as:
Big Johnson, Small Richard, lil Peter, Huge Willy, etc.
Ungulates. Because who doesn’t like a hoofed animal?
My client machines are even-toed ungulates (order Artiodactyla) and my servers/IoT machines are odd-toed (order Perissodactyla). I’m typing this on Gazelle. My router is called Quagga, both after the extinct Zebra subspecies and the routing protocol software (I don’t use it any more but hey, it’s a router).
This is my favourite comment. I laughed out loud. Thank you.
Porn stars that the machines remind me of.
Stop judging me.
Well, now i need to know which ones are and what particular feature of the pcs reminds you of them
node-0 node-1 node-2 …
Everything runs kubernetes so the names are mostly irrelevant.
Years ago I worked at a company who named everything after WoW characters. I wished murder was legal in those days.
“did you just kill LUN11 or LUN01? Oh no! Let’s hope the backup is okay!” – paraphrased from 9 years ago.
You know what’s worse than an image you can hold in your head and know you need to work on Gandalf and not Shaggy? “were we decomming uswablsalc108, or was is uswablslca018? Better check again,” and remember why telephone numbers were only 7 digits long.
Discworld characters. My storage servers name is Luggage, my phone is ‘Ig’, the vacuum is named after a monk.
I use Discworld geography for physical devices. VMs have character names.
Same, but mine is specifically “The Watch”-Characters. Proxmox is Vimes, NAS is Colon, Pi is Nobby, Linux VM is Angua, Windows VM is Carrot, and so forth.
the vacuum is named after a monk
Lu Tze?
Anime girls. I want to change but I’m too far gone to have a random name
Rei - main pc
Asuna - main server
Milim - plex
Aqua - laptop
Darkness - first plex (the drives failed and lost everything rip)
Rem - raspi (pihole)
Ram - second raspi (home assistant)
Highest mountains on Earth. Maybe not the best idea, since it took me a while to memorize Kangchenjunga.
Hey, home labs are for learning…
At least you didn’t choose Welsh towns or lakes in Massachusetts…
I do Greek goods and Titans which leads to a similar problem. But I just love that my main proxmox host is namend after a Titan with many arms.
Servers (physical or virtual) get named based on usage: host-lab-01, vpn-guest-name, nas-01, proxmox-01, etc.
My wife’s laptops get named [her name]-[model].
My machines (physical or virtual) get named after fairies from Pixie Hollow.
A friend of mine names all his hosts afer famous battleships, his dad names every host after Star Trek ships and their wireless networks are all named after LOTR locations.
As for me, each hostname consists of the device type and the location of the host, no matter if it’s local or a vps in a datacenter somewhere.
I use names of mice from popular movies and TV shows. I use this list.
I know it’s not useful, but it’s fun to me. I would never use it in a professional environment.
mine would be quite simple and boring I suppose.
- Mobile Devices are just named after their model (typically the default name it uses, e.g. Pixel 7)
- Network equipment is named after its purpose and/or the model name. i.e. [brand] Router
- gaming consoles are again just the default, which is more or less the model and perhaps a random string.
- IoT devices are named after their purpose. i.e. ‘Weatherstation001’
- Desktop clients and the intangible network stuff like SSID, workgroup are the only area where I get mildly creative. I take names from geography. Cities, mountain peaks, ocean currents. Generally something mildly connected to outdoor sports.
Fruit trees. There’s a ton of them.
Call me boring but
First 3 = OS/appliance type
Next 3 = Purpose/role
Last Character = Environment / lane
(numbers added if more than one)Having a server called “Enterprise” is cool … but when I get an email saying WINNASP or RHLFTPQ are down, it’s much more useful and descriptive.
I’d definitely do this for work but I know who farnsworth is on my home LAN
Derek Derek1 DerekNew Derek2 NewDerek Ted DerekNew2 DerekTheServer Derek-Derek DerekMini
Also, MaximumDerek
Derek_final_v4
DerekDerekBoBerekBananaFanaFoFerek_1
