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?
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Derek Derek1 DerekNew Derek2 NewDerek Ted DerekNew2 DerekTheServer Derek-Derek DerekMini
Also, MaximumDerek
Derek_final_v4
DerekDerekBoBerekBananaFanaFoFerek_1
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
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)
I do Japanese city names and the drives in the machines are named after railway/subway stations in said city.
I use trees and other types of shrubbery. Towers and laptops are named after trees while Pis and the like are named after bushes and ferns.
Examples please?? I love this!
Pine, Oak, and Aspen for the towers on the network. My primary laptop is Rubber and my Surface tablet is called Birch. My raspberry Pi 4 is Pedatus, the species name of some raspberry bushes.
I love it! Thanks for sharing!
One of my nicknames is Hugo. I have a Windows, a macOS, a Debian and a Raspbian machine.
So I call them Hugowin, Hugotosh and Hugopi. The Debian machine mostly runs Plex so it is named Plexy. And my Phone is called iBobes because someone once told me that Bobes mean ass in german and i though that is incredibly funny.
FYI: Bobes does not mean ass in german. That’s not even a german word.
Edit: Maybe they meant “Popo” which is closer to butt/behind in english
German here, yes it does and it is. It’s not a high German word, but a dialect one (but it’s present in multiple German dialects, mostly all Franconian ones, as well as Hessian and Swabian). Usually it’s written “Bobbes”, though.
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
I used to name my cloud VMs after Monogatari characters but now I just settle with
xxn.domain.tldso it’s easy to remember when I need to SSH into one.-
xx= shortcode for which service the VM is from (for example Azure = az, DigitalOcean = do) -
n= VM number from 1-9
do2.domain.tld-
deleted by creator
A fellow liver of mythology I see! I use the watcher angels from the book of enoch.
Hi there! The links in your text lead away from the user’s instance, here are fixed links that stay on each user’s instance: [email protected]
Try monopoly board street names like oxford road or parklane. Or maybe flower names like daisy or pertunia.
Shrek - OPNSense, because it (firewall) guards my swamp.
Dragon - NAS, because of a dragons hoard.
Donkey - Proxmox, I use this for a few VMs and docker containers. It stores my DNS, donkey was annoying, and there is nothing more annoying than your DNS going down.
Fiona - Backup NAS - less big, only stores important backups.
Because I’m a huge dork, all my machines are named after the FFXIV jobs:
Desktop-Red Mage Laptop-Machinist RaspberryPi-Sage etc.
