Hi fellow selfhosters!
What hostnames do you use for your systems and services?
And maybe why if it’s an interesting story.
I’ll start:
Steam Deck: krax
Smartphone: krix (once I get LineageOS installed again)
MiniPC: krux
Reserved for future use: krex & krox
Creative, I know. 😅 The names have no deeper meaning. The x comes from Linux. That’s it.
I know some of you use god names of certain pantheons, such as Thor. But I find that boring as a lot of people are doing that.
Now let your pants down and tell me all about
your embarrassing host names!
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I self-host for learning and fun. So I name my home servers with the car names.
Server Hostname car name RaspberryPi cooper Mini Cooper Old Laptop Raptor Ford F150 Raptor PC Hummer Hummer The printer’s name is Marvin, from HHGTTG.
It never wants to work and always complains.
I use the names of greek deities for my host names, mostly geared towards the function of the server/computer.
- Nyx (dark-blue laptop)
- Hypnos (gaming machine)
- Argus (pi-hole and reverse proxy)
- Prometheus (minecraft server)
My two wifi bands have always been Castor and Pollux.
For my servers I try to use names from the Final Fantasy universe. Lately been focusing on FFXI end game bosses.
Kirin (opnsense firewall) Byakko (proxmox host) Tiamat (proxmox backup) Shiva (Nas)
The only clever virtual machine names I care to brag about are: DockBox (VM running docker) Jellxc (proxmox lxc running jellyfin)
Mine are named after the penguins from the Madagascar movie : Skipper, Private, Kowalski, and Rico.
Unfortunately there’s only four so I often supplement with a suffix. For example, I’ve got an old windows laptop kicking around that is “rico-w”
… I should really commit to a naming scheme with a wider array of options.
Why limit yourself to the penguins?
I named mine after Rocket League cars.
- Octane (main desktop)
- Breakout (laptop)
- Dominus (laptop; older, larger)
All my hostnames are after Zen Buddhist concepts, like shikaku, hongaku, mushin, wuwei, jiyu, etc. My printer is the only thing that breaks this trend, it is named pos
Why not Saṃsāra? Or maybe it’s Rin’ne in Japanese?
I have been saving that one for when I get a framework laptop
I just memorise the IPs lmao. then again I only have 1 or 2 hosts up on my network ever
I take a word that’s related to the purpose of the new host and put it in an online translator and cycle through languages until I get something cool.
What names has this process come up with?
I originally named all my hardware after members of the Wu-Tang Clan plus some close affiliates, but I actually ran out of names, so now I use MFDOOM aliases for my workstations, and keep Wu-Tang for infrastructure, because it’s for the children.
Asterix & Obelix themed.
- Asterix is a rpi4, strong and small with ssd running dockers with homeassistant, revproxy and webserver, and camera storage.
- Idefix is a rpi3, mainly test only nowadays.
- Obelix is my desktop running voidlinux.
I used to have Pneumatix which is the mailman as the mail server and Panoramix, the druid, as domoticz server, Heroix, chief, as firewall and Bellefleur, beauty, as webserver 😉 All were LXD virtual servers on a pentium 3. I try to find a character matching the functionality. Except for domoticz all are now dockers on Asterix, so less use of funny names.
Non linux machines would be roman names from Asterix & Obelix, but I have none …
At work we used famous dogs. Laika, Pluto, Cerberus etc
Rock types and Greek gods. Everything from emerald to Aphrodite.
I go for the unoriginal but oh so simple: location-type-No
So HL-SRV-01 is “homelab server no 1”
HS-DSK-02 is “House desktop no2”
NA-LPT-01 is “Not Applicable” because this is my admin laptop that I expect to move around a lot so I always treat it as high-risk.
Used to be names from Neuromancer like “ono-sendai” and variations of that.
Now laptop is “flat”, server is named after it’s purpose like log, mail, mon, hosting, storage, etc.
References to The Dark Tower or Murakami characters.
