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?
Personally I use corporate-like naming scheme for my devices, the format is:
[AABB-CCCC-DDEE]
AA: Location of the device - HQ (home), CL (cloud).
BB: Role of the device - HV (hypervisor), SV (server), NW (network) and workstation (WS).
CCCC: Device brand (for NW), application running (for SV), and workstation purpose (for WS).
DD: For server and workstation - OS running on the device (WN=Windows, LX=Linux, MA=macOS). For network device - their role on network (RT=router, AP=access point, SW=switch).
EE: # of the device, year of purchase for WS.For example, here’s my router, KASM server and my gaming PC hostnames:
HQNW-UBNT-RT01 HQSV-KASM-LX01 HQWS-GAME-WN16Still trying to optimize this naming scheme, like removing all the dash, but currently too lazy to do it lol.
My kubernetes cluster is k3s1, k3s2, k3w1, k3w2, etc. My load balancer is called… lb.home.lan. I guess that we are not as creative.
WoW places. Since some of my servers died, I’m currently only sitting on dark portal (Firewall), and the Stranglethorn Valley server with Gurubashi Arena (Plex), Booty Bay (you can imagine) and wild shore (shared file system VM)
Fruit trees. There’s a ton of them.
Battlestar Galactica years ago. Dradis for the domain name and ships for the computers.
Galactica.dradis Pegasus.dradis Basestar.dradis And so on. Made it fun.
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.
I don’t have a very consistent naming theme. I’ve used various names related to music, science, and art. I have a decomissioned machine named “numbers” for example.
However, I would like to point out we have plenty more than 8 celestial bodies of interest in the solar system if you include Eris, Ceres, Pluto, Makemake, the moons of Jupiter, and more. It might not be indefinitely extendable, but may help in the short term.
I have no naming consistency, whatever I feel like that day is what it’s name ends up with.
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’m incredibly boring. I name them with the company/model name. And what role they have appended.
Cute naming schemes are for people who don’t have lots of servers. At my work we have over 700 servers. We’re not naming them after something arbitrary, we’re being descriptive.
I name devices after Greek Gods / Goddesses. My main server is called Olympus.
Same Greek or Roman gods and mythical creatures. loki, hades, medusa, cerberus
Sounds like you could start using the names of moons. But a pantheon does sound like a good system too, should also include the titans.
Mine are named after mythical Asian creatures.
Phoenix, Kirin, Yuki-onna, Dragon, Kodama, etc etc
Gravity falls characters: Mabel, Dipper, Soos, Wendy, etc…
Do you match the service with the characters personality?
That’s a TODO, atm they’re names that reflect their role. So my reverse proxy is “roundabout” because it directs traffic internally
Star Trek ships at home. And Game of Thrones characters at work.
