Choosing names for your computers

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by s-phi-nl • 16 years ago

77 86 16 years ago

philwelch• 16 years ago

Classic. I have a naming scheme for my personal laptops--female characters from sci fi series. I've had an aluminum PowerBook named Kira, a black MacBook named Dee, and an aluminum MacBook named Kara so far.

waterlesscloud• 16 years ago

My current naming theme is Song Of Ice And Fire characters. The netbook I'm writing this in is named Tyrion, for example.

nreece• 16 years ago

A nice naming scheme (for server names) I read about somewhere suggested following the periodic table. Element names can be used as the server names and corresponding element numbers as corresponding IP addresses (subnet suffix) of the servers.

sketerpot• 16 years ago

That's as good an excuse as any to post the Periodic Table on the wall.

AngryParsley• 16 years ago

There are other advantages to this naming scheme. Element abbreviations can be used as short DNS names. For example, both lithium and li could resolve to 192.168.1.3.

Also, groups of elements can correspond to types of computers. Halogens can be embedded devices, noble gasses can be gaming machines, alkali metals can be file servers, etc.

mojuba• 16 years ago

I'd use radioactive elements for Windows servers.

Also, hydrogen - firewall/GW, oxygen - mail server, carbon - public web server, iron - source repository.

thestoicattack• 16 years ago

All my computers are named after Star Wars planets. The recently acquired MacBook Air is "naboo".

thwarted• 16 years ago

I kept running out of names with various schemes, but right now all my machine names are words that end in x.

ghshephard• 16 years ago

I name our servers after the asset tag numbers. DNS can then be used to provide an inventory of our data centers. It also ensures we have a programatic and automatic way to name machines, and numbers are remarkably memorable after a while.

js2• 16 years ago

Any scheme based on a pool of names does not scale. If you have big plans, a sequence is the way to go.

soult2• 16 years ago

There are lots of pools you could use that offer a vast amount of names, assuring that you never run out even if you have a very large number of hosts. Good examples in my opinion are names of things existing in real life, e.g. band names, names of famous (CS) people, ..., while fictional names (characters from some book) tend to run out too soon.

You could even partition hostnames, e.g. all workstations in room 1 are named after famous rock stars, all workstation in room 2 are named after famouse rappers, etc.

petercooper2• 16 years ago

A big(ish) hosting company I once worked for used Caribbean islands. This rapidly turned out to be a mistake and it quickly turned into any islands, then cities, then god knows what :-)

My current scheme is using major LA thoroughfares (Pico, Victory, Ventura, etc) but as I'm unlikely to scale beyond two digits, I'm not worried ;-)

s-phi-nl• 16 years ago

Did you did consult the following list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_in_the_Caribbea...?

petercooper2• 16 years ago

Very cool! I suspect they did not exhaust that list :-) Though "Barrel of Beef" doesn't seem like server name material to me.

iamdave• 16 years ago

I've got a pretty simple naming convention: interstates.

harpastum• 16 years ago

Previous article and lively conversation on this subject: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=834817

wfarr• 16 years ago

We use names of beers and liquors. Works well enough.

lief79• 16 years ago

Only time I remember having interesting computer names out side of college, the companies lawyers put a squash to it. Infectious diseases just has so much creativity to it.

I suspect they were ok with "cholera", but someone in the legal department got upset with "ebola". I think the rest had been disabled by that point, and I'm sure they were already off the internal dns.

spudlyo• 16 years ago

Don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names.

Oops. My work computer is Spaz, my iPhone is Dirty Sanchez and my laptop is Dingleberry.

carbocation• 16 years ago

Fittingly, we name our servers after universities. Ivy League colleges are web-facing, the Pac-10 are database servers, and the Claremont colleges are dev boxes. Ultimately no scheme will hold up, but at least we have a few thousand pre-made names to use.

soult2• 16 years ago

While looking at the serverfault thread linked somewhere in this post, I found the following site: http://www.namingschemes.com/

It's a whole wiki full of naming schemes. It actually included the one I am using (Battlestar Galactica callsigns), which I though should have been pretty unique.

froo• 16 years ago

BSG callsigns, cool - I've been naming my machines after 80's transformers for years!

sunkencity• 16 years ago

i have two machines on a similar theme the first is called battlestar. and the other is galactica. my backup box is called medic.

tvon2• 16 years ago

My first naming scheme revolved around monkeys, I had spacemonkey, funkymonkey and.. I forget the third. That one didn't scale well.

For a short while I used characters from children's books (mom is a librarian who loves children's books), this included lafcadio, lorax and grinch.

Right now it's robots from Futurama. Bender, flexo (the Win XP dual-boot of bender, which is OSX), clamps, roberto (the crazy, stabbing robot), calculon and my dedicated server, robot-devil.

Not that anyone asked, but hey, naming schemes are fun!

andrewvc• 16 years ago

Hah, so I'm not the only one to go the Futurama robots route. My personal fave is Boxy (Is he objecting or backing up? I can't tell!)

tvon2• 16 years ago

Good name for a Boxee box.

cgranade• 16 years ago

For my personal systems, I choose names of demons (since they run lots of dæmons). I get a little thrill out of not knowing what to name something, and taking it as an excuse to go look up cool names.

nrr• 16 years ago

I use names from various books, in no particular fashion. Most of my names are from Tad Williams books, but I've been known to use the names of Anne McCaffrey's dragons as well, with some names from Norse mythology tossed in for good measure.

My current workstation is pfefirrit. In the past, I've had fizz, click, karthwine, ninebirds, nuzzledark, nipslither, bast-imret, earnotch, and knet-makri as servers. My old workstations were cloudleaper, bite-then-bark, pop, hushpad, and tailchaser. My firewall was meerclar.

As far as laptops go, I've used munin, hugin, odin, krelli, skoggi, krauka, nrefa-o, mnanth, and caylith.

Back when I did IT for a couple of schools, I used chemical compounds in a certain fashion to reflect room numbers.

RodgerTheGreat• 16 years ago

I go with colors. My main machines are Indigo and Violet, and I have a server under my bed called Aubergine.

jballanc• 16 years ago

My portable is always DeepThought, my desktop/workhorse machine is always Earth, and my backup volume/server is always Magrathea

100k• 16 years ago

Probably not very original, but I use titles of SF books I like that also reflect on the machine (sometimes).

Here's some I've used:

- tau-zero

- subtleknife

- Dark Light (iPhone)

- Omega Device (iPod Nano - I like this one :)

- skyroad

- zodiac

decavolt• 16 years ago

Thundercats. I name all of my machines after the Thundercats.

thewileyone• 16 years ago

Coruscant, Hoth, Yavin, Dagobah, Tatooine, Dantooine, and of course, Deathstar

watmough• 16 years ago

Mine are named after Star Trek characters.

Troi (MacBook), Picard (iMac), Locutus (Mini), Crusher (MBP).

At uni, most of the computers were named after distilleries. i.e. Livet, Morangie, Grant, Islay etc.

joezydeco• 16 years ago

I heard of one organization that used disasters. Titanic, Hindenburg, Ishtar... the nice part is that you keep getting new ones all the time.

I'd probably avoid Eyjafjallajokull, though.

abalashov• 16 years ago

Especially since the technically correct spelling is Eyjafjallajökull. :-)

avar• 16 years ago

In IDN that's xn--eyjafjallajkull-jtb, quite the server name.

groaner2• 16 years ago

Finally, a use for Google Sets: http://labs.google.com/sets

ax0n• 16 years ago

I've never seen that before. When I was in college, I named all my machines after songs by Orbital. This worked pretty well since they were, back then, cranking out a new album every couple of years or so. I added chime, midnight, and halcyon to Google Sets to see what it would come up with and every other suggestion on its list was the name of an Orbital song. Nice.

Osmose• 16 years ago

My boss is the sysadmin for my school's CS department; there is an IT department that every other department uses, but they're slow and useless.

For the longest time, their servers were named after ships, such as Bismark, Arizona, Enterprise, etc, while all of our servers were named after things that sink ships, such as Broadside, Salvo, Crash, Leak, etc.

bmelton2• 16 years ago

I've always had (what I would guess are) odd schemes. My first naming scheme was based around beat poets (Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs), but currently, my scheme is 'cool Jacks that I like', which includes Bristow, McCoy, Kerouac, Kevorkian, Kirby, etc.

BSG callsigns sound awesome, and somebody else mentioned colors, but I think scaling that gets confusing, especially if you're color blind, as I am.

donw• 16 years ago

Doctor Who characters for my home systems here; my black MacBook is called Tardis, because it's bigger on the inside, and the Dell server was obviously styled by Davos, so it's called Dalek.

Naming schemes help keep the fun in managing computers.

d0m• 16 years ago

Disney chose to name their computers like some planets; while the NASA chose to name their computers like some Disney characters :p

Supermighty• 16 years ago

I used to name my computers after Cathedrals but there weren't enough that sounded neat. So I switched to names of English cities.

thought_alarm• 16 years ago

My computers and devices are named after popular females of the 1920s:

- myrtle

- mindy

- mabel

- ilene

- irma

- iris

- patsy

- floy

- agnes

- nellie

Nellie, of course, is my beautiful NeXT cube.

KC8ZKF• 16 years ago

Bond women. Kissy, Pussy, Solitaire, Domino, Vesper, Honey, Goodnight...

groaner2• 16 years ago

Bonus points for when someone asks which computer you are using and you say, "I'm on Pussy."

I worked at a place that gave female names to all the computers. It was a little awkward.

jallmann• 16 years ago

josh@moneypenny:~$ echo "I actually do the exact same thing."

kordless• 16 years ago

In the 90s, fruits. Coconut, kiwi, orange. Had a Cisco named passion. When you'd ping it from the Solaris box (pineapple) it would say "passion is alive".

Around 2000 with Grub I did bugs. Ant, roach, mosquito, brainbug (from starship troopers).

2005 or so a buddy got started using Roman names for servers. Dido, Leptis, Aeneas, Ulysses, Spartacus.

My home computers are super heros/villains. Superman, ironman, greenlantern, jeangrey, magneto, thing, hulk.

alanh• 16 years ago

For my own devices, I just name them anything related to space exploration. I make it memorable and appropriate. Launchpad was where I did all my creative work. Pocket Rocket was a Mac Mini. My iPod was Cassini (comparatively small / weak spacecraft); when I lost it, I posthumously renamed it Atlantis (after the Shuttle).

Originally I named devices after computer science visionaries — the computer I built, I named Kilby, after Jack Kilby.

duck• 16 years ago

I once used programming languages for a small lab. They were identical machines and the weird thing was 'java' was the slowest and 'arc' always needed to be rebooted.

dotBen2• 16 years ago

f@@k, s@@t, c@@t, crap, fart, bollocks, ar@e, etc all work great for computer names for me.

dotBen2• 16 years ago

I knew I would risk karma on this one. but I'm not trolling, and these are the names of my computers and servers. It has worked well for me for years.

jff• 16 years ago

I just name them after whatever I feel like. Among them: alpha, hiro, zoidberg, LOKI (VMS box), fafnir, glenda, p9, illiac, jerq, perq, and beer.

JeanPierre• 16 years ago

I think the idea is straightforward: Use short names you use rarely, and preferably give all your computer a theme.

I'm currently using Greek Gods, but surely Roman Gods should be just as efficient. Planets should work as well, if you include imaginary planets (From, say, Star Wars)

Lazlo_Nibble• 16 years ago

I usually pick a name based on some piece of music that's nearby the first time I get asked to set one. Sleepwalk (Santo & Johnny), Skyscraper (Underworld), Hinterland (William Orbit), Zoolookologie (Jean-Michel Jarre)...

binarymax• 16 years ago

My names are always the planets, and 'SOL' is always the name of my PDC.

ivenkys• 16 years ago

Google sets and Greek mythological figures . For my personal list of 7 computers that's fine.

kmano8• 16 years ago

The twelve classical olympians were always enough for me, too.

8plot• 16 years ago

I like naming systems after ex-coworkers, and especially ex-managers.

ErrantX• 16 years ago

I use random names from Firefly - there is actually a goodly number of you think about it for a bit.

tdmackey• 16 years ago

I use names of Star Wars planets and my wireless ssid is The Outer Rim

ableal• 16 years ago

Amusing take:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/22/verity_stob_name_you... - Don't call me Ishmael - Choosing a name for your new PC

riobard• 16 years ago

I'm following the Futura characters. My Unibody MacBook is called Bender because it indeed has a shining metal ass (although different kind of metal) :D

davidw• 16 years ago

This is, incidentally, the same Don Libes of Expect and Tcl fame.

mfr• 16 years ago

At the risk of self-promotion, a while back I did a presentation on naming schemes for network devices, which have slightly different requirements than servers:

http://www.nanog.org/meetings/nanog31/abstracts.php?pt=NjExJ...

Keyframe• 16 years ago

My workstation is named Casper, because it had a fried motherboard and I thought it was dead. Other option was Lazarus. Notebook is Pegasus, because it's powerful and can "fly around". Render nodes are RNn.

paulshort• 16 years ago

My main home computer, a laptop, is named Workhorse. But after seeing some of the creative naming techniques people in this thread have used, the next machine(s) added to my home network will be named using Klingon swear words.

I quite like the idea of using the word 'petaQ' to name a computer, especially if it happens to be a Windows machine.

systemtrigger• 16 years ago

I want a computer like Tony Stark's in Iron Man, so named mine Jarvis.

pcarmichael• 16 years ago

I've gone the Lord of the Rings route before using locations: shire, barrowdowns, moria, lothlorien, isengard, mordor, rivendell, etc. The only bad thing was that only about one in ten people knew how to spell isengard.

patrickk• 16 years ago

In college, I had a lecturer who named companies in an assignment after characters in The Wire (Avon Barksdale etc). It's possible he downloaded this from the internet though. It certainly made things a little more interesting.

ryane• 16 years ago

Roman emperors: augustus, tiberius, caligula, claudius, etc.

pg2• 16 years ago

We used Tintin characters: tintin, haddock, calculus, snowy.

statictype• 16 years ago

Going on a tangent: Did you read Tintin while living in America? Because from what I've understood, those comics are almost unheard of there. Is that not true?

starkfist• 16 years ago

I've seen many volumes of Tintin at the bookstores in NYC, both independent shops and Barnes & Noble. I also remember them from youth, but wasn't a big fan. I don't think they are super popular, but have been available.

pg2• 16 years ago

I don't know about the rest of America, but they were pretty well known in Cambridge, where I first discovered them.

projectileboy• 16 years ago

Last summer, I went through the whole series with my kids as bedtime stories (minus Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America, which are a little beyond my PC threshold). We loved them! I have no idea why every kid in America doesn't slurp them up like candy.

gbookman• 16 years ago

Blisterin' barnacles! I was introduced to Tintin with the animated series on Nickelodeon. Probably watched too much TV when I was a lad

poutine• 16 years ago

My most successful naming scheme was using the names of Cheeses. There's a crapload of cheeses out there.

blogimus• 16 years ago

We used Babylon 5 characters on one network, but kept getting "duplicate name exists on network" when we got to "Zathras"

callahad• 16 years ago

I'm quite fond of using typefaces -- you can be surprisingly descriptive:

Arial (laptop), Futura (internet tablet), Minion (home server), Courier (router), Perpetua (VPS), etc.

a-j-h• 16 years ago

I have in the past used characters from the Wheel of Time.

Currently using types of peppers in work.

Using characters or items from Neuromancer for personal stuff. My netbook is onosendai.

rikthevik• 16 years ago

Transformers names have worked well for me. FortressMaximus and OmegaSupreme being some highlights.

calcnerd256• 16 years ago

My naming convention is naming conventions. My server is named slogan, my tablet is named color, my netbook is named protagonist, my car (a Nissan Quest) is named Tribe, my ad-hoc wireless network's ssid is synonym, my external drive is named planet, and my server's replacement will be named category.

wanderr• 16 years ago

Our sysadmin insists on using numbers to name systems, in combination with an abbreviation representing the OS. For example, RHL015 is our 15th server running CentOS (Red Hat Linux). It's quite maddening!

Choosing names for your computers

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