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?
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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
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.
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.
Rfc1178 be damned.
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).
Biological taxonomy is a great source of a huge number of systematic (and colloquial) names.
All computers are named after dogs. My dogs, dogs in the family etc. the dog name should be carefully match to the computer’s role and characteristics.
My peerlessly reliably golden retriever will almost always have a server named after him. The most powerful computer in the house is named after the monstrously large golden my parents had when I was young. My sons gaming pc is fast but perpetually broken, named after our greyhound. Laptops are named for smaller dogs, SBC devices get named after toy size dogs.
Wi-Fi ssids should always be named after cats.
This is the natural way of things.
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.
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
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’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 usually go with characters from the Discworld series. So far I’ve had a Rincewind, Ridcully, Twoflower, Weatherwax, Ponder, Librarian, Luggage, and Hex, plus a router called “The Clacks”. Really ought to get Vimes and crew into the mix, now that I think of it… maybe the next one will be Angua or Carrot.
Physical machines get stars names: Vega, Arcturus, Polaris, Fomalhaut, Deneb, Antares, Procyon, Algol, Aldebaran… and so on.
Virtual machines naming scheme is more reasonable: [os]-[role][number if needed]. Examples:
- alp-proxy
- talos-controlplane-3, talos-worker-1, talos-worker-6
- deb-storage
I use the same as you for virtuals(os-mainFunction), and similar for physical (brand-lpt/dsk/srv-mainUsage - Len-lpt-VR1, Srfc7-work, hp-srv-pve1).
I am boring like that.
I also don’t name vehicles.
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.
Kittybox: old laptop that my cats like sitting on
Thinbox: new laptop that is thiner then kittybox.
Tallbox: desktop
Tinybox: BeagleBone black single board computer acting as server
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
Shakespeare.
Hamlet, Puck, Beatrice, Portia, Horatio, Antony, etc. My wife’s devices have always been females.
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.
