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
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.
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.
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.
Well I’m glad you know it’s there!
I can’t comment on your particular technical debt, as I’m not very psychic. I like how you say not to be condescending and require me to be psychic. That’s cool, but I bet you’re stressed.
Have a good week.
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.
Discworld characters. My storage servers name is Luggage, my phone is ‘Ig’, the vacuum is named after a monk.
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.
I use Discworld geography for physical devices. VMs have character names.
the vacuum is named after a monk
Lu Tze?
Yes! 🤣
Makes perfect sense, with him always sweeping the Omnian gardens 😄
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
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.
This is my favourite comment. I laughed out loud. Thank you.
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.
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.
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)
Derek Derek1 DerekNew Derek2 NewDerek Ted DerekNew2 DerekTheServer Derek-Derek DerekMini
Also, MaximumDerek
Derek_final_v4
DerekDerekBoBerekBananaFanaFoFerek_1
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.
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.
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.
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.
do birds fly? do ducks duck?
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.
