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I Want Names for my Servers!
"System Engineer" is the loving title my employer gives members of our small group that takes care of the servers. Linux, Solaris, AIX, NT, Novell; we are the shepherds that hold this herd together. Often we pet our respective servers, maybe run our hands over their keyboards or do a quick ping just to make sure they are okay. A server likes to be treated nicely, and if I must call it LNXSERVER0143 then it just doesn't get the kind of treatmeent it deserves.
At my previous employer the Netware goons had taken the initiative of using cartoon characters as the naming scheme. It all started with Rocky and Bullwinkle, moved on to Looney Toons, and slowly evolved to include Sesame Street for the NT machines and Disney Characters for the Unix machines. Nothing like logging in to WILE_E_COYOTE, BUGS_BUNNY, or ELMO to cheer up your day in your little cube of isolation. It helps to humanize those objects that can be such a pain. I recently heard of a company using characters from 'Taxi' and 'Mary Tyler Moore'. Being able to say, "Hey, is the hard drive on Mary going?" or "Rhoda isn't accepting logins any more" or "Someone tried to hack RevJim" provides just the kind of relief needed in that time of crisis. Of course, it's also fun.
But in the last few weeks I stepped out on the limb where I now am. I felt the rather lame practice of naming servers after trees (we have Ash, Oak, and Pine as well as others) was getting on my nerves. So I took the chance and named a few servers after X-Men. It's a good theme, with lots of characters to choose from and lots of cool graphics easily available. There is, of course, no official written standard at my employer, but the helpdesk supervisor who had his new app on the servers felt that Xavier, Storm, and Cyclops were not professional enough. They just didn't have the professional feeling of "Oak" and "Ash".
My day was, of course, destroyed. We System Engineers now are tasked to come up with a professional-sounding naming scheme or live with something as intelligent as the machine OS concatenated with the serial and model number, or some such nonsense. Oh the horror! Can you imagine "SOLARISSPRC20SN324234"? What a wonderful name!
Granted, one of my coworkers has suggested Dilligaf. With a little knowledge that one doesn't go over well, and it is but one name. A consistent theme is needed, a theme that fits with the System Engineers, the people who keep the servers happy.
The question has been posed "How will a new person know what the server does if it isn't named something logical?" Well, any person worth their weight in bits knows that XAVIER is probably a primary or secondary DNS, and CYCLOPS of course is a Helpdesk Web Server. It may take a little explaining, but my four year old could grasp it in a couple of minutes. I would expect a computer science major to get it in less than a few hours. And there are such things as aliases!
Xmen, television series, Star Trek ships... Give me my names, let me express myself! How can I as a System Engineer in my structured little cube with my structured little OS and my structured IP scheme live within these restrictive bonds forced upon me by an uncreative group of suits? I don't want a lime-colored Mac, I want real names for my Servers. I want to be able to have my NT Primary Domain Controller called CHER and the Secondary Domain Controller called SONNY. I want to have ELMO, GOOFY, and DONALDDUCK for SQL servers. I want to have Xena and Hercules be the firewall. Break free, my fellow engineers! Don't let 'the man' keep you down! Stand forth and name your servers, establish your theme, and create a standard before someone dares to put their foot down.
The freedom we seek today can only help those who follow us.
Keep the faith!
--Andrew D. Smith
SPOCK - DSG (Development Services Group)
SPARKY - the Fire Department
MAINT - Maintenance department
I use characters from John Varley's Gaean trilogy(in order of importance). I've just got one computer now, so it's Cirocco. If I get another, it would be Gaby. Posting as AC, cause I can't remember my passwd.
they can't gripe about unprofessionalism when you're going way over their heads ;-)
The admin at my previous employer was into classical music. He named many of our servers after 20th century composers: adams, stockhausen, bartok, etc.
I like to name our servers under slanderous words like: fucker, asswipe, asshole, dickwad, etc... It's really cool when you get to say: "Damn! The fucker went down!" ... or "Freakin-a! That asshole won't stop disk swapping!"
Ha! I've been promoted FROM "Systems Engineer", and I'm an Art School Dropout with only an Associate's Degree.
(I am a CNE, MSCE)
When I started my current job I spent some time testing different ways to backup workstations. In a sense I was building machines that were going to probably be wrecked by something silly, so I named the first "Coyote" in honor of the Road Runner's hapless attaker. I ended up needing to rename the machines every time I tried a new thing, so started a hybrid monster movie convention. You had "son of Coyote" "return of coyote" "Coyote vs mothra" made many failures alot easier to deal with.
My high school had five SGI Indy boxes which were named after subatomic particles: photon tachyon lepton graviton baryon
I might be relevant for all sites but we use the syntax: AA199XX where: AA is a two letter building code 1 is the floor (0 being basement) 99 being the room number XX being initial of the primary user That way when we see US489BP acting up we know that it's Bob Person in the Upper School building on the 4th floor. Granted the use of user initials is problematic because machines change ownership. In the case of roaming laptops this at least gives of their primary office room location. At another site I used spices for the names of machines. salt, pepper, nutmeg, etc. Funny how many people didn't know what cardamom was.
My notebooks havce always had names that refer to "speed": velocity, impetus, and now, momentum. I used to use airport designations for server names when I was in Alaska. AIN, ATK, AKP, BTI, BRW, NUI, PHO, PIZ for the North Slope. Here, we'll be using philosophers. socrates, plato, aristotle, etc.
First post on /. for this one year alumnus. Please be kind. I'm a PHB, been a sysadmin or Director of Dev since 1978 (yes, most of you were not even an itch in your daddy's trousers back then.) Have used many of the conventions posted here, and loved them all. Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail; Hewey, Louie, Dewey; planets; elements; funky names; all the basics. Time came to use names that pinstripe customers could grok. We came up with two schemes that worked, both worth considering. One was the NOAA storm name lists. They're scrubbed for PC and have the advantage that they're selected by committee not to overlap with geographical names so you don't end up with legacy "wierd name pointer" problems. Worth looking up at noaa.org tho I don't have the URL in hand. Look for "hurricane names" and you'll get the last 5 yrs. Also liked one ex-Coast Guard guy who worked for me who proposed using CG cutter names, also PC, but cooler than storm names. Don't have a pointer.
That's right, if some bonehead makes you name servers that are not "cute" at least name them something else that will tick em off. Something like: qpzm019dk of course, you could get a little silly, something like urapnes69
heheh
Obviously you didn't skip "Peckerhead 101"
I am starting to name all of our computers after characters from Beowulf. I am writing this on Grendel (linux), and Beowulf (our nt box), just crapped out. We need more computers to continue the scheme.
The 7 deadly sins: Pride, Anger, Gluttony, etc. I-words from the dictionary: Integrity, Indulgence, Innovation, Intuition, Instituition, Ethereal (ok, not an I-word but...), etc.
At work, we have named all of our servers. One of our hp3000 boxes (ok, tower of box) is named taz, an so forth. It helps out to, except for wacko, yacko, and dot have been crashing alot (nt :) lately. Anyways, yeah. FLaK Where is my mind, where is my mind...
yeah i name all my servers with redneck girls' names....so far in my collection: Dixie Darlene Daisy service with southern hospitality :)
kinda goes with the other large nouns
Use the borg naming convention. If you have 9 servers, assume that one day you will have 15, and start naming them 1of15, 2of15, etc. Using this naming convention will probably not be seen as unprofessional, as the suits are usually not that bright, nor are they trekkers.
...
... We are NDS. Resistance is Futile. You will be Authenticated
At my previous place of employment, our Network manager was a cool guy. Our servers were named: REN, STIMPY, NEWTON, TOOT (root on toot), XENA, GAZOO, HOMER, FLANDERS, and BORT (Hardcore Simpsons fans will understand)
telnet xb
And got back something to the effect of:
telnet: cannot connect to 0.0.0.11
** CHECK THIS OUT FOR HOSTNAMES **
http://3520061480/
Games networks by students are great too - new names every session. We've got CHUCKY, who was thrown together out of everybodies spare bits, SWANKY PANTS who once got some swish equipment, BADASS coz it's got evil temporary tatoos, SHITHOT . . . coz that guy has lots of money :), POS for Piece Of S***, as there's some relucatance among others to support Intel :) And next session ????
What you're advocating is usually referred to as "security through obscurity" and is considered farcical.
I wonder... Does naming servers after federal Prisons cut down on hacking attempts against your srever? If there is such a thing as "social hacking" then is this the reverse "social security" "Never try to walk across a river just because it has an average depth of four feet." -- Martin Friedman
If, like Voltaire's Greeks and Egyptians, you care to split hairs into 4, it's not iambic pentameter. More like anapestic tetrameter. But it is funny.
So how about metrical feet (and related) for names? Anapest, dactyl, trochee, iamb, anacrusis, terzarima...hmm, might be just as cryptic as CQX753 to non-English types.
Personally, I use fish (flounder, squid, exocet), but at work I've started using certain French cartoon characters. This one's endless:
asterix
obelix
ptightnet
getafix
macroeconomix
bacteria
etc
An ornery cowherd
The first company server in my shop was named, by an idiot, Compaqp90. It was a Pentium 90 when first setup, now it's a 500 or something. It will still be Compaqp90 in five-ten years when it isn't a Compaq and is 1000s of times faster then a P90. Sigh.
To name a few: doozer, feenee, gobo, red, sprocket, wrench, wingnut, begoony, boober, and wembley. =)
We just started to get some [GNU/]Linux development machines in, and for a variety of reasons, needed to deal with them as a group. Ye olde seasoned sysadmin took me aside and said something to the effect of "Son, I can't administer these without a little help, being a Solaris kind of guy, and stuck handling the NT boxen as well. There is a perk: you get to pick a naming convention theme." Well, I recounted this to the other person who was starting development on the [GNU/]Linux, and after thinking for a couple minutes, I hit on the idea of Hindu gods. And so were vishnu and shiva christened. We only have the two boxes so far, but I'm certain the next one will be called brhama. - Rene S. Hollan, posing anon.
I used to name my computers after alchohal. corona ciderjack everclear But, I when I got to the Bud, wis, and, err. I figured I should start something a little more sain. So I started using greek gods. Heres some of the names I used. zeus.athens.prv hermes.athens.prv aries.athens.prv athena.athens.prv merlin.athens.prv hera.athens.prv pan.athens.prv I seem to use .prv for my LAN. I think it kind of separtes things from the net a little. Also names I used to use... charaters from dilbert charaters from gumby the seven dwarfs I was going to use voltron, but, i couldn't rember there names. Damn, that was one of the best cartoons ever. Anyway........
All my linux boxes are named after Gauls,
- getafix
- unhygenix
- dogmatix
My Win32 machines named after Romans- julius
- brutus
- odious
My Macs are named after Norse- decaf
- timandahaf
On the remote possibility that you don't know who asterix is check out The Official Asterix SiteIt also has lists of characters for naming your machines.
As for server names, I almost always use my old AD&D characters! *grin* This lends them a personal character that you just won't find in most naming conventions. If this doesn't go over well in a particular setting, I've been known to use astronomical constellations and heavenly bodies (the planets, not the lady in the cubicle next door!).
I am working with my home network, I have 3 PCs that I can boot with various Linux and M$ OS's. Here are some I have used and am thinking of using: Big 400 mhz Win 2000 Server: HAL9001 Same Machine under Linux: Dave 300 Mhz Win 95 Machine: Hal9002 Same machine under NT: Hal9003 P133 Linux Box: WOPR 486 with Linux: ENIAC (Too old and slow for anything but maybe a print server or firewall, and too big to fit on my desk)
I am working with my home network, I have 3 PCs that I can boot with various Linux and M$ OS's. Here are some I have used and am thinking of using:
Big 400 mhz Win 2000 Server: HAL9001
Same Machine under Linux: Dave
300 Mhz Win 95 Machine: Hal9002
Same machine under NT: Hal9003
P133 Linux Box: WOPR
486 with Linux: ENIAC
(Too old and slow for anything but maybe a print server or firewall, and too big to fit on my desk)
Things are much funnier with a limited domain, when you have to think hard when you miss the obvious options. I heard about one which used names from the Wallace and Gromit animations: anything past "wallace" and "gromit" is necessarily obscure. One network I heard of in Australia had named them after Red Dwarf characters. There was the obvious, (Holly, Rimmer, Dave, Cat, Kryten) but everyone's favourite was 'toaster'.
Andrew
You can't forget about:
*Sherrif Little
*Cooter
*Flash aka. Velvet Ears
LuLu Hog
or the nicknames, like "Little Fat Buddy"...
Monday is my first day in a new shop, and their (our!) machines are all named after moods as well. I think I'm going to name my box 'bipolar'.
it's lame to post about spälling and grammaticks... =)
At one of my old jobs, we started naming machines when we started buying VAXen (it was a while ago)... so we had TASVAX, EAGLE, and then HEATER (an old 11/750). My home network is a rather eclectic mix of Spanish explorers of the southwest US (Kino, Serra, Coronado, Cabeza), and Catholic saints (DECstations Damasus and Dominic, IBM machines Irenaeus and Ignatius, gateways Raphael, Gabriel and Michael, plus miscellaneous machines like Athanasius, Augustine and virtues like Fides, Spes and Caritas).
We work on an animated TV show (and recent film) so we're allowed (even expected) to get frivolous with machine names. Workstations get names from the show's characters (stan, kyle, kenny..). The file servers are jesus and satan - while the render servers are minion1, minion2, etc. It definitely adds a touch of flavor to otherwise drab conversations. example: q: How was your day today? a: Crazy. Jesus went down on me again. All in a day's work. ;P
We do as well. We'll never run out of names...
We named one of our Windows machines after Monica Lewinsky. It seemed fitting. :-) Like the real Monica, that particular server is no longer in active service.
So far:
Cairhien - K6-III 450 Slackware 4.0
Shienar - P150 OpenBSD 2.5 (firewall - "Borderlands"
Illian - P266 Win95 (wife's)
Andor - P233 FreeBSD 3.2
Caemlyn - Gateway Solo 9100 (laptop) Slackware 4.0
And there's a lot more names left...
I never really consider naming a box, until I'm halfway through an install and it asks me for a name. And it wants a name immediately... the pressure is on - I just type in whatever comes to mind first. Of course, this is usually late at night, after a few drinks.. so there is absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. They tend to be chosen by character of the box, for the most part.
diantha - I have no idea where this name came from (besides a lot of champagne?) this is a dual boot P200 that I use most of the time.
betty - could have been named after Betty Boop... or maybe Betty Page, either way it's a 486 (linux only!) I've had forever.
mercenary - this is a K6-2 350, not a bad system - built mainly to learn NT for work. (so I hardly touch it)
abacus - an old 386 laptop. 'nuff said.
achilles - twin of abacus, but with less RAM and a flaky battery... plugging in the charger while it's running kills the display.
After they've been named, the name sticks forever despite OS changes and hardware changes.
astraea@vivid.net
Since my company is Avalon, the Isle where King Arthur and his knights took the Grail, we've got a lot of Roundtable/Monty Python names: Arthur
...and the printer is ni!
Excalibur
Galahad
HolyGrail
Merlin
Roundtable
Sword
Lancelot
Kaniggit
Guinevere
Moat
The only glaring exception being Tim the Enchanter. Though, my favorite hostname on our 'net has gotta be spaceheater...a DEC PDP11/44 that runs BSD 2.11
You ought to yank Atanasoff and put Eckert and Mauchly in. If what I've read is true, Atanasoff gets a lot of undue credit for doing some very specialized work that ultimately wasn't very useful.
Cool, that's exactly what I do.. so far I've got Gandalf in domain middlearth, and frodo in domain underhill (unfortunately, they're nt boxes)
At home I use the stooges... moe, curly, shemp, larry...
I'd like to see some of these 'sysadmin' and 'guru' sites set up a categorized 'server list' database... heheh Its really cool though .. and the article was right .. its one of the last few enjoyments we have to keep a sane mind My last job was a complete Novell / WinNT network. The wide-area network administrator informed us that the naming scheme was this: "Girls' names that you wouldn't want to go out with" ... We got right into it and came up with tonnes like "Bertha, Martha, Helga, etc" .. When I quit and formed my own company, I liked the previous naming scheme, because it was original, but decided to op for greek sounding names. Until I read the replies to the article - I thought I was one of the few.. hehe guess not.. But I still wanted to make it original .. so I picked Greek names that ended in 'les' .. So I got Sophocles, Achilles, Pericles, Hades, etc etc .. its really fun. I've used so much already that I find myself doing some heavy greek mythology reading to come up with more. :)
Hekabe (Queen of Troy) for the firewall
Beeblebrox for the SMP machine
Marvin for the NT server
Berlin (ex Zaphod) for my WWW (live in Berlin)
Cheers,
Sixtus (too lazy to login)
--
yhpargotpyrc devorppa tnemnrevog troppus I
tara, katie, simone, melissa. It's rather simple actually. They're all women I lusted after but could never attain.
;)
If, somehow, I run out! (Ha ha!) I can always turn to Poke'mon.
Rooter = Dial-up/Masq server 486 :)
Human = My computer booted in linux
Planter = My puter in windows (planter was a dumb brothertree)
Vitrual-Planter = VMWare windows (same drive, just diff hardware config)
my friend works at an organization that uses antidepressants for hostnames, e.g. zoloft, prozac, valium, etc. My box is cobalt. When I told my dad I was using element names for hostnames he came up with mithril for his computer. (For those not in the know, mithril is some kinda bulletproof rustproof swordproof everythingproof metal used in making armor and i guess swords. In tolkien books)
Damn, it could have been mine, too.
I just had to dawdle around though,
and I still couldn't get it right...
At my college (Reed College) our servers are named after egyptian gods: amon anubis osiris set isis It's certainly different. Weirdly, although we do have some Suns, amon is a DEC Alpha. -Dave Turner, AC of convinience
I saw disasters used once: Hurricane, typhoon, earthquake, etc.
I've been using planets/planetary-bodies myself. (Boring, but it was late at night when I came up with them. (mercury, mars, luna, saturn, etc.)
I've seen cartoon characters, trees, snakes, planets from sci-fi novels... You name it, its out there.
How about plants? (rose, tulip, grass, weed)
Cities? (NewYork, Newark, Boston, etc.)
Countries? (France, Spain, etc.)
Our first SPARC was called venus by its owner, so I went with that and named all the other machines after Roman goddesses. So now we have: venus, isis, vesta, eos, pax, hekate, luna, mania, juno, diana, hebe and medusa (we limit the length ... it saves a lot of characters over the long term!)
Thinking up server and workstation names is just part of the fun of running a network. I like to name servers after chemical elements (mostly inert gases) and name workstations after stuff in physics. Ergo . . . some server names : OXYGEN, ARGON, XENON, HELIUM, KRYPTON, TUNGSTEN and for workstations : NEUTRINO, BOSON, TAO, GALILEO, ABACUS, CHAOS, FRACTAL and so on and so on. Are we having fun yet ?
let's see.... in the beginning we had .... wind, fire, rain, storm then I heard a Candlemass CD.... misery, death, pain, sorrow then I watched TV .... mission, greed, lust, anger, pride, gluttony, envy, sloth luckily only a few people see all the real names =:) how many people look at mail headers ?
I sure as hell wouldnt want to work on Kenny, it would be a known fact that it will die at least Once every day (Except for christmas). Cartman would be far to slow. Stan .... well that hat says it all. ..... PJ
You're missing the most important (and the names used for an HA pair): bo & luke
I think the original form is "No Thanks, Not Trusted. Not Today, Not Tomorrow"
phobos fear
deimos dread
styx hades is on the other side (proxy
server)
eris mischief (for windows boxen)
thanatos death (banyan or novell box)
medusa owner's wife's pc
i work for an aerospace company. phobos and
deimos are moons of mars, so i told the
president i named the servers for moons of
mars when i really named them for the feelings
you get when you clock in in the morning....
kh
..
I have started to use Pokemon characters also. Most "adults" don't know what they are but the "adults" with kids usually shake their head. ;)
we use a bird theme.
easy to come up with short ones, plus
you can use expressions like 'duck is dead'
or 'goose is cooked'.
loon
goose
duck
dove
tern
stork
finch
turkey
...
montana nudes samus oleary genghis idontcare wildman speedracer active grant father no real theme here, but I definitely couldn't survive without cool naming convention ( if it is really a convention in this instance?? :) -Venom
montana
:)
nudes
samus
oleary
genghis
idontcare
wildman
speedracer
active
grant
father
no real theme here, but I definitely couldn't survive without cool naming convention ( if it is really a convention in this instance??
-Venom
Although initially I named machines after dead
Mexicans (zapata, carranza, huerta, obrigon,
pancho-villa, etc), ever since I redid my network
one night in 1997, I've been using names from the
George Clinton genre:
parliament, mothership, funkadelic, flashlight,
motor-booty, pfunk, dvoidoffunk, mr-wiggles, hump,
sucka, funkentelechy, placebo, etc.
Note: This only works if you have One Network Under
A Groove, Getting Down For the Funk of It.
At one of my previous jobs, I was training one of our engineers on nfs. The two machines that we gave him were Fred and Ethel. After giving him the basics, he began to mess with the systems. I eventually got this call from him: "Hey, I've got this problem... Fred can mount Ethel, but Ethel refuses to mount Fred." To which I replied with manical laughter.
Dipsy (green for SuSE box) Po (red for Red Hat box) Lala (yellow for Caldera box) TinkieWinkie (purple ?? Maybe I need a Cube) NuNu (sucks for Micros~1 box)
I, like many others prefer scifi names, however I like to choose names that have a little meaning to them
HOLLY is my Windows95 box, because it's completely senile.
QUEEG is a linux box that slowly is slowly taking work away from HOLLY (because it's so efficient)
TARDIS is the main linux box, because even though it may be a little old (P233) it still gets the job done.
TRANTOR is my firewall, because "all network links lead to Trantor"
I suppose if I got more servers I'd start naming them after Asimov planets, Terminus, Anecreon, Neo Trantor, Korell......
So far we are naming our servers based on great canadian engineering.
So far we have:
Avro NT PDC (Company that made the Arrow)
Arrow NT BDC (Awsome fighter that got s**T canned in the 60')
Bluenose NT production server (A Scooner that kicked a*s)
Luna, Salamando, Undine, Jinn, Dryad, Gnome...
:(
Damn, I need to stop playing Secret of Mana and get back to work.
At my university we have Obed, Ohaton, Ra, Set...
as the only sysadmin for a medium sized business, i have the sole task of naming our [my] machines. if the boss[es] dont like it, tough shit (tho, they usually go with whatever i say):
orodruin - my workstations (orodruin1 orodruin2 orodruin3)
gollum - print server
gandalf & saruman - all purpose servers (one linux, the other NT *grin*)
minas - file servers (anor, ithil, morgul,tirith)
nazgul - numerous terminal type machines stationed around the building (ironically, there are 9 of them)
basically, whenever i get a new machine to put up, i take out my tolkien books and grab a name.
At work our previous theme was 'fuzzy little critters':
mole, weasel, ferret, squirrel, raccoon, groundhog, hamster, mouse, rat, chipmunk, hedgehog etc.
Our 3 main NT servers are huey, dewey, and louie.
The current theme is 'early space program':
programs: mercury, apollo, gemini
rockets: atlas, redstone, titan, saturn (as in V)
Notable Purdue alumni astronauts: grissom, armstrong, cernan, chaffee, etc.
There was the states lab, the counties lab,
trees, colors,
colleges,
mountains,
cowboys, indians, tribes,
sports towns,
car makes or models,
eqyption landmarks,
music legends (elvis, ringo),
planets or galaxies,
horse breeds...
Oh boy, this is fun!
serwerurchin protoclown sidekick arthur etc... I particularly like the sewerurchin one... Blade
Someone once told me the Sun workstations at his company were named after Gene Wolfe characters: Severian, Thecla, Dorcas, Talos, etc.
... :-)
They were, after all, new Suns
Mine are...
Rockefeller
Vanderbilt
Carnagie
Kennedy
Hughes
Dupont
and as soon as the two G4s arrive...
Gates
Allen
I name my machines at home after characters in
gibson books.
Examples:
Name ------- Character
----------------------
Raebel ----- Hairdresser
Wintermute - A.I.
Continuity - A.I.
Count zero - Hacker (sort of..)
Molly ------ Hired muscle
Finn ------- Hardware joeboy
Yeah!
"Be incomprehensible. If they can't understand, they can't disagree"
We run a few networks here for our own "things".
our first "fun" network is named 1 - anus 2 - bung 3 - anal 4 - sphincter 5 - fecal 6 - poo
I name mine after movie stars, but there is a catch ... every time I add a machine (or format, etc.) I name it a star who played in a movie with the previous star ... only problem is, every sixth box is named kevinbacon ...
...
--bobdole
CONTROL-ALT-DELETE
The Cornell university supercomputer is "batcomputer" ...
There were hundreds of them. All great names and if you run out you can use the greek as well as the true translation names. For example
;)
Greek True
isis --> aset
anubis --> anpu
bast --> Ubasti
etc.
Ill be adding a windows system to the servers soon to handle voice mail (Sorry linux is just not up to that task yet..) I was thinking of calling it Set after the god of chaos I thought it sounded about right..
The system admin. I used to work for had a large book with the names of all the various flora and fauna of the Australian Outback. He would just turn to a random page when choosing the name of new servers - which is why we now have machines called gumtree, bilby, numbat and even one called termite!
After pondering just such a namespace dilemna a few months ago, I came up with a novel approach. Instead of boring schemes involving mythic names, physics particles etc., I decided to name my UNIX boxes after each of the girls with whom I have had sexual intercourse. Christine, Hee-jin, Mai, Elizabeth, Sreelatha, ... Make sure your S.O. doesn't notice any names subsequent to her own, however!
Sylvester - NetBSD Mac IIsi
Tweety - NetBSD Mac SE/30
Ice - NetBSD Sparc 1+
Fog - NetBSD Sparc IPX
Wind - NetBSD Sparc LX
Kirk - Sun3/260 (SunOS)
Scotty - Sun3/60
Spock - Sun3/60
Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, etc. - Apollo DN's
Oddesy, Iliad - NetBSD PC's
Sampson - OpenBSD PC
Rover, Fido - Linux PC's
Hi One way around this I've seen whilst travelling around was to use two naming conventions, for 'official' name for the PHB and one for the engineers. the official name was the boring O/Snumber style and the actual name in DNS etc was the more interesting and rememberable. Gets around the crap. martin (maxsec@totalise.co.uk) (Who wouldn't be anonymouse, /. logged me out and I can't get back in as my emails screwed - grrr)
...somehow it seems fitting, especially when I've got the server all apart in pieces on the computer room floor (gumption trap). So: Phaedrus, Chris, Pirsig, Quality, Lila, Dusenberry, etc.
syphilis, herpes, warts, gonorhea, discharge (Mail server), etc.
At one company, we did this. We had the periodic table posted here and there so people would know their IP addresses. Servers were noble gasses, desktop machines were metals. The developers tended to choose names like technitium, while our manager chose gold. I was copper.
BTW the English translation of SD3 is very cool.
Is llama good at running perl?
I'd bet Cyclop's box has and IR port and the Xavier box is on wheels. :-7
We initially used professional wrestler's names. Using names from 3 different wrestling promotions (WCW, WWF, ECW) allowed us to differentiate between the Novell, Unix, and NT machines.
For a while, anyway. As time passed and wrestlers would go to work for different promotions or change their gimmicks, the scheme unraveled quickly. We also added the names of Japanese wrestlers, which confused the contractors to no end. Of course, I no longer work there, so it's no longer my problem...
It's amazing how many sysadmins name their machines after Star Trek or other sci-fi space vessels. How unimaginative. Mine are all named after REAL spacecraft to honor the astronauts, cosmonauts and everyone else who committed their lives to the advancement of space exploration.
And your old boxes are extinct? ;-)
I have often used mountains for servers and rivers for clients.
Here in Oregon users seem to find that appealing. We can daydream about climbing "Jungfrau" or "Eigar" or paddling down the river "Salaween".
My boss is a huge Godzilla fan, and we have control of about 20 of the servers at our office. So, they all get assigned a name of a monster from the old Godzilla movies. It's a great convention, and there are plenty of names to choose from. Also makes for a cool intranet theme, where our site is labeled Monster Island. Pictures and bios of all the monsters are available among all the usual work related stuff. The best part is listening to everyone else in the office trying to pronounce their names!
Ghidorah; Hedorah; Anguirus; Spiega; Destoroyah... Haha Great fun!
A friend of mine who worked at NASA GSFC named the servers after characters in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. The names sound noble/classical, and the High Geeks twiddling with their satellites in the labs didn't mind/care.
After all, for all the trouble a server can cause when it malfunctions, it seems right that it's named after a bloodsucker.
I use the names of monsters from godzilla movies. ghidora mothra rhodan gojira godzilla etc
Same thing over here. But, the 'main' computer is called 'sol'. Then we have names like terra, luna, etc.
It doesn't have to be the names of the characters but rivers, mountains etc.
The last place I worked named machines after jewels, (jade, topaz, etc).
I name machines after Pixar characters (lightyear, tintoy, flik)
Another good scheme is James Bond characters (domino, drax, etc)
And snack food (hoho, cupcake, zinger)
And probably my favorite scheme, Addams family characters (lurch, gomez, thing, it, mama, fester)
If you are in charge of the DNS, doesn't it stand to reason that you could give the suits a hierarchy of aliases while you the loving keeper of the machines knows their real names.
Or more in line with your relegated role, let 'the man' give them their 'real' names, and you as the nanny give them their aliases, their nicknames, the names that only their friends call them, the names that the people that are working on them know. Don't the X-Men have incognito names. Wolverine had a name before he was injured and reconstructed didn't he (although I am at a loss for what it is).
Just a thought.
-Tom
(actually, I'm mikelieman@albany.net -- too lazy to login...)
When I showed up here, There was 1 server named bsi.
When I went to replace it, I got a pair of servers, named them JUDY and AUDREY (the landers twins...)
Replaced our bsi server with AUDREY, so I was left with bsi, and judy...
Needed another name, used ROSIE (the jetson's maid) for the box that transfers files b/t unix and as400...
Needed to name a NT server, called it K9 (doctor who's dog...)
Needed another one to move files... Called it ROBOT (Lost In Space...)
needed to replace it, called the new one k9, and made the old one PIKACHU (runs nt, it's annoying, and isn't going away soon...)
peace
Mike
I've almost always used album names for hostnames. At work for a while we used redneck names (billybob, cletus, hoss, mack, dusty, elliemae) but being an ISP in Kentucky, we figured we might annoy a customer or two with the same name :) So I went back to album names. mindcrime, fragile, darkside, dookie, signals, nevermind, zenarcade, frankenchrist, balance, pulse, broken, tusk, porksoda, gish... you get the idea.
I named mine Pandora... very fitting since I always open the box and get into trouble!!!
I call my servers "Sahara" after my dog :)
At home I use names of vehicles that I have owned...
Sprint - Linux ftp/web/samba
Dart - NeXT (interesting for it's time)
XE (Nissan Pickup) NT/BeOS
Accord - Mac
At work we are moving to an inventors and scientists convention...
Edison
Morse
Franklin
I like cool names so I have named my computers: flashdance, sysbabe, trillian. Why name an computer with a boring name? flashdance is 2 x 550 MHz celeron. sysbabe is P133 with 91 days uptime. trillian is PII-450 MHz. ... /iocc (cookies dont like me)
I like cool names so I have named my computers:
... /iocc (cookies dont like me)
flashdance, sysbabe, trillian.
Why name an computer with a boring name?
flashdance is 2 x 550 MHz celeron.
sysbabe is P133 with 91 days uptime.
trillian is PII-450 MHz.
I and one of the other sysadmin's at my work place are old-school punk_rockers so nameing scheme follows that line...
dk (dead kennedys)
clash
hardcore
punk
huskerdu
blackflag
next in line are probably:
anarchy
ramones
kira
et. all....
(live to hack, hack to live)
Our computer science department lab names the boxes after dead "computer scientists":
atanasoff
babbage
turing
lovelace
hopper
alkhowarizmi
boole
bush
forsythe
piter
seymour
vonneumann
zuse
One naming convention I'm fond of is "allegedly gay"-- people who are suspected of being gay but either never came out or aren't popularly thought of as gay. It's just vague enough that nobody quite knows what the naming convention is. It's a great way to mess with management while looking completely innocent.
Batman
Robin
Tinkywinky
Achilles
MrGreenjeans
DaVinci
Plato
Chewbacca
One boxy little HP server - "squat". My workstation - "phlegm" (they complained a bit about that one 'cause it might be hard to spell but I won 'cause no-one should be connecting to that box anyhow...) T
We named our actualcomputers at work crack, speed, etc... we are graphic artists, so when someone screwed up an order we can say "what were you on crack when you did this!" it was really funny for the first day or so the we no longer did it.
i agonized for weeks on what to call my server
i ended up with norse myth
domain - yggdrasil
client machines - asgard, midgard, niflheim etc
the gateway/firewall - bifrost
logins - odhin, thor, baldur
as an afterthought, i suppose i could have spent more time on it and i totally forgot the greek mythos...
but there is certainly a multitude of ideas out there
Disney characters aren't just for Unix machines. All our nodes at LTU are named for the seven dwarves from SNow White. Well, the first seven nodes, the rest are named for Star Trek (TOS) people. I believe my account resides on Uhura...
suprised to not see more, especially since
Mine are:
Magrathea
Trillian
Slartibartfast
Damogran
Megadodo
Maximegalon
Easy. Name them properly with descriptive names and then create CNAME aliases for them that you can use.
How can you get upset with "Dynamohum" if she starts misbehaving? just think of all the possibilites UTMRK ZombieWoof MuffinMan StudioTan Sofa Brainpolice ValleyGirl etc.... and for that playful Linux box: "Penguin_In_Bondage"
The last place I worked in had VAX clusters named after famous computers from dodgy TV sci-fi. There was Holly and Kryten (from Red Dwarf), Zen and Orac (from Blakes 7), Marvin and Earth (from Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy; Earth being Deep Thought 2 or something).
Front Line Assembly is known for very imaginative one-worded song names - usable, though rather wacky.
What do you say about:
vigilante, retribution, fatalist, deception, corruption, sado-masochist, comatose, predator, circuitry, neyrologic_spasm, condemned, victim, overkill, provision, mental_distortion, oblivion, mindphaser, toxic, mutilate...
oh well.
ya gotta name them Mr. Pink, Mr. White, Mr. Green, Etc...
The rest are named after Tolkin "Lord of the rings" characters. Samwise is a secondary file server used to proxy Internet access for a few people. Pippin belongs to a member of the Sales staff.
Of course PEBKAC used to belong to the member of sales who.... Well, the computer name says it all.
For those really large server farms, Pokémon is your only legitimate option. =)
After spending 10 years working in arcades (mostly as the gametech), I just had to to the same thing. All my servers are named after video game companys (past and present). My older PC's are named after older video games (Ladybug, Red Baron, Pong, Sub Hunt) and my newer machines are named after the newer ones (Street fighter, T-Mek, Rush2049, Spawn). My routers are named after Pinball machines.
To see my inspiration, check out:
http://www.rockysreplay.com
-Megabyte
One company I worked for, a startup, let us choose the naming convention for th machines. We decided on nulear accidents. Windscale (old name for Sellafield in the UK) was the first, then came Harrisburg (Three Mile Island in the USA), then Chernobyl. After that we thought we might have trouble. We didn't. There have been lots of them. Chelyabinsk (waste tip exploding), Dounreay (the same), Konsomolets (satellite crashing and spreading its guts all over the Canadian landscape), SuperPheonix (burst pipe spreading superheated radioactive salt all over the site). I no longer work there, but I'm informed that the scheme is still in place, the most recent ones being Nevada (blast doors on a test failed, trashing a multi-million dollar spectrometer) and Novisibirsk (a Soviet nuclear sub that went critical). And all of those are just for starters. There have been many more, there have been so many, even the NSA, with their *acres* of machines, could use this scheme and not run out of names. I was pretty convinced previously, but even more so now, that fissile nuclear tech is just too plain dangerous.
I like the names they assigned to the servers in my department at uni. When I first came here, the department had just bought 8 dual PPro 200s to supplement the Sun Quad Ultra-Sparc. The Sparc was called Jupiter, and the PPros were named after its moons. (Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, etc.) A bunch of other machines, are named after subatomic particles. (Neutron, Proton, etc.)
Personally, I probably would have called the Sun box Sol and the PPros after the planets, but either one's good.
Then there's the workstations, which are just the room number, x if its an X terminal or pc if its an NT machine, and the machine number, eg. the terminal I'm writing this on is V353x17, probably because no one could be bothered thinking up good names for 100+ X terminals and NT boxen.
Why don't you try less whining and fucking around and more working?
Like any f it matter s a shit.
see http://www.urbicande.be/htm/base.htm
hehe, here at .tusculum.edu we have been using 'the silmarillion' by tolkien as our 'naming bibile' for awhile. so far we have: angband, annuminas, gwath, sirannon, morgul, morgoth, sulimo, neldoreth, menegroth, ungoliant, tharbad, shire, minas, shadowfax, aragorn, tar-minyatur, tol-in-gaurhoth, dor-nu-fauglith, quendi and few others. i'm probably also the only one who remembers which one is which :) ananke@inferno.tusculum.edu
My home server is Talkie-Toaster. Naming a server is an extension of your personality and creativity. Stifling that for corporate image and professionalism is downright silly.
STRANGELOVE
gates.domain.com
staline.domain.com
hitler.domain.com
clinton.domain.com
attila.domain.com
At my work, Ive been naming all of the servers
using words from the mix of english and russian
that makes up the special language in A Clockwork
Orange, i.e, my Fileserver/Printserver is Malchick
the SQL is Devotchka etc etc
My home business is called Weatherlight Technologies. To try and keep the theme, we have the following scheme:
Our Ip_masq gateway/firewall/main workstation is called: "Mainsail"
Our development workstation is called: "Sirensong"
Our laptop is called: "Clippership"
Our palmtops are called: "Sextant" and "Sundial."
It's a little prettier sounding than our our old naming scheme: Stalingrad, Easternbloc, Coldwar, KGB, and CIA.
We use military aircraft names here:
Prowler
Galaxy
Warthog
Apache
Thunderbolt
belldandy : file server urd: Sysadmin's workstation. hasegawa : mail machine. sayoko : news server. mara : dns server. keiichi : general user machine. skuld : software development. tamiya : firewall.
Thank you very much slashdot, that xmen link to xmen.com has nothing to do with the comic strip. That kind of shit can get me fired at work. Check the links before you pot them you dumbfuck.!
I started off with Diamond and Topaz. Then I sold diamond and I now have Ruby instead
Should be able to keep going like this for a few more decades :-)
The Miscreant.
Picasso Matisse deKooning Warhol M_Barney
There is a real place called NoMansLand in the Somerset area.
Our border router is Wormhole, straight from the O'reilly bind book. Our main ethernet switch is entropy (24 ports of random 10/100 switching...) Hope is the NT webserver (it has HOPE to become Linux) Freedom was our first Linux webserver Desire used to be a 386, and it desired to be more, which it now is so I should name it satisfied Purity was an IP masquerading/firewall server for our workstations (purifies packets) Saladshooter and sweatbox are the network printers We named our new Linux workstations: sloth, lust, pride, envy, greed their NIS server is anger, and the NIS domain is "emotion". Appropriate.
belldandy : file server.
urd: Sysadmin's workstation.
hasegawa : mail machine.
sayoko : news server.
mara : dns server.
keiichi : general user machine.
skuld : software development.
tamiya : firewall.
Who's Jimmy? Do you mean Jimi?
I use DnD referencs every where I go.
Theres a company with a few servers named after the dragons from the MM.
Theres another with servers named after the warrior level name fighter, warrior superhero...
Have some servers named after the monster that TSR used then got sued for. Cthulu, Fafhrd, Mouser...
We have CRAP_NAME_NTSERVER here and during one stampede of migrating printers we had CU_NTSERVER
They didn't buy "communications upgrade"_NTSERVER
Yep. We had some really good names in a place I used to work - Ariadne and her sister Chryses.
:=)
Of course some smart arse came along and names one of the development machines Euxanthius so that no one else would log in
Rhodes University in South Africa use boring animals for their servers (buffalo, jackal, etc).
The best naming scheme I could come up with was Asterix characters. Each character has a job that you could map approximately to what servers do in a typical office environment.
My 2c worth anyway.
Figures you commie GNU people would name your machines after your pinko leaders.
At a prior job, a coworker had started naming his machines after assorted drugs...
x.domain.foo
speed.domain.foo
crack.domain.foo
and so on.
But he needed a name for his router.
So I suggested marijuana.domain.foo... after all, it's the gateway drug, right?
I use jet names:
phantom (F-4) - old 486
tomcat (F-14) - firewall
eagle (F-15) - workstation
Somehow I got started naming all my machines with words beginning with 'h':
HAL
Han (Feizi, ancient Chinese philosopher)
Hesse (as in Herman, German author)
hanta (found mouse droppings in the case when I got it...)
helvetica
heliopause
My old P-83 Linux box is named Saratoga after
the American aircraft carrier (CV-3) {which needed two A-bombs to sink}, and the P2-350 Win98 machine is Bismarck.
When I joined my research group we had oh so creative names for our machines like GaAs, InP, RTT, RTD, SiGe, and HEMT. About 3 months ago we ordered 6 new machines and I was so afraid that our current naming convention would stick. Before the machines arrived I requested IPs with the following names.
porous
gooey
sticky
absurd
crispy
sour
Goofy adjectives seem to make great computer names. My advisor wasn't so happy at first but now I think its grown on him.
this is similiar to the way we do it. we go with a 3 charachter city code followed by a srv or wks (depending on its purpose) then a 2 digit unique identifier. ex. Balsrv01: Baltimore server #1 again this only works for your medium scale networks, less than 99 machines at one location...
I like sustaining a verge-of-going-postal atmosphere, so these are good, subtle server names (don't forget your printers/print queues): Oswald Czolgosz Booth Sacco Vanzetti &c &c...
When we started out, one of our goals was to take a product that was losing money and make it profitable. So our machines got named after currencies in the world dollar, franc, dinar, ruble, punt, peso, pound, crown, schilling, won, kuna, etc. It's lots of fun when someone machine gets "devalued" in the world economy. They're the butt of the day's jokes.
We pulled our names from computer name that are used in Science Fiction. How is that for irony. Colossus from the motion picture "Colossus: The Forbin Project." Guardian also from the motion picture "Colossus: The Forbin Project." Hal the Hueristic ALgorithmic computer from Clarke's 2001. Harlie from the book When Harlie was One by David Gerrold. Joshua from the motion picture "Wargames." M5 from the now syndicated 1960s era science-fiction adventure series (and sit-com) "Star Trek." MCP the Master Control Program from Disney's "Tron." Sal the successor to Hal, featured in Clarke's 2010. Skynet the supercomputer designed by Miles Dysan for Cyberdyne Systems. The computer was featured in "The Terminator" and "T2: Judgement Day." Zen from the British science-fiction series "Blake's 7."
Examples are:
:)
Cobalt
Copper
Potassium
Lithium
Tiberium (My machine, but nobody seems to have noticed
My roomate named his home box Acheron, after deliberating for weeks using a mythology book. I named mine "bitchslap" just to tick him off...
names of babies, like puppy! I'm going to go hack the puppy!
We use coffee/caffeine realated terms for our network.
Here is a short list
java
javajoe
caffeinentic
caffeine
snapple
darkroast
flatuence
decaffeinated
hazelnut
halfnhalf
coffee
bunn
mrpibb
juanvaldez
perculator
cuppah
nodoze
shock
shen-nung
buzzbuzzbuzz (after the Ben and Jerry's Ice cream)
sugar
water
kona
sip
coolata
filter
sugarcubes
latte
moxie
classiccoke
swig
mochjava
diuretic
stir
grounds
pour
zoombrew
grinder
mug
nuthercupfull
moo
go-cup
earlgrey
decaf
houseblend
jolt
mountaindew
frenchpress
and on and on.....
I hope you find something that suits you and your crew!!
We use Great Tyrants of the world here at work...My machine is Genghis Khan, we have Hitler, Mussolini, Washington, Sun Tzu, Stalin, Churchhill etc...the boys in Corp Security HATE it but screw em :)
In My dept. at work we have the worst names...
Server like: SV00 - SV66, You try and figure out which are print servers....
User: "The print server is down!"
Me: "Which one?"
User: "Oh, I don't know... SV sixty-something."
(btw, there are 4 print servers in the 60 group)
our workstations are numbered Wxxx (In no particular order either, I suggested giving them the cubicle #'s, but nooo.)
But, at home i use cool names like:
Leviathan
Behemoth
Goliath
Gossamer (orange alien side-kick of Marvin)
Fury
Wendigo
and Enigma.
I just got a new machine... needs a name... any suggestions?
herpes
hiv
aids
warts
syphilis
chlamydia
gonorhea
Now honestly, if would you want to crack an OpenBSD firewall named gonorhea...even k-rad script kiddies would be revolted =)..ahhhh security through disgust.
I've always used the names of well-known and not-so-well-known rivers and mountains for my server names. The benefit of this is 1) Easy to remember, especially if you can associate some characteristic with the server's job and 2) There is no end to the available names. For example :
K2 : Dual PII 333 FreeBSD box
Denali : Multia RH6.1 Web Server
Gallatin : SPARC 5 DNS machine
Madison : SPARC 5 running MySQL
Jefferson : MIPS R4000 (purpose not yet determined)
The local CS department went with my suggestion for a naming theme -- beers. So now we have: amstel anchor-steam bass becks black-label courage dab guinness harp harpoon heineken hornsby killians labasst mile-square molson murphys mythos oregon petes-wicked red-stripe rolling-rock saranc st-paulie stinky tuborg woodpecker yuengling (hmm. Seems we have a couple of cider drinkers in there.)
I have: Mnementh Prideth Smaug Orm Kalessin Puff Komodo And some wag even came up with St_George
We use Norse Mythology for our servers. Gods for NT and Monsters for UNIX. Of course, our Linux server is named Loki. PDC/BDC: Njord/Skadi(husband & wife) USER DATA: Frey (their son) PROJECT DATA: Freya (their daughter) Sun Development: Grendel Sun Web: Garm Sun DB: Fenris I agree, have a little fun!
Ok there's a program called domtools which let you do a lot of things.. I allways use it when I'm bored and want to look up subdomainnames.. it works in about 75% of all domains...
,dumbass), toggle "recursive" on and press "list all hosts in domain"
http://www.domtools.com/domtools/
if you want to try it out on the web, select a domainname (without www.
it works on slashdot.org too :
slashdot.org.
adfu.slashdot.org.
everything.slashdot.org.
images.slashdot.org.
irc.slashdot.org.
eu.irc.slashdot.org.
DK1.eu.irc.slashdot.org.
UK1.eu.irc.slashdot.org.
icecast.irc.slashdot.org.
mp3.irc.slashdot.org.
mp3stream.irc.slashdot.org.
quake.irc.slashdot.org.
shoutcast.irc.slashdot.org.
streams.irc.slashdot.org.
us.irc.slashdot.org.
AZ1.us.irc.slashdot.org.
CA1.us.irc.slashdot.org.
MA1.us.irc.slashdot.org.
MD1.us.irc.slashdot.org.
NY1.us.irc.slashdot.org.
www.irc.slashdot.org.
mail.slashdot.org.
scuttle.slashdot.org.
sebastian.slashdot.org.
triton.slashdot.org.
ursula.slashdot.org.
vanessa.slashdot.org.
warez.slashdot.org. (ohw baby)
web.slashdot.org.
www.slashdot.org
Have fun,
Sarin
I can assure you that the names oak and ash derived from looking out the window and seeing that particular tree and saying 'gee, why not oak'
me and my friend collected our scrap parts, and built a machine named captainplanet since he was created by our powers combined. my first linux box was a 486 i made from parts found (im not making this up) in some guys front yard laying half in the street, so roadkill was the natural choice.
naming after stupid bands is also fun....i had anthrax, so my friend follwed suit with styx, then somehow procured a new box named ferryman (as in the ferryman of the river styx in hell)....afetr ferryman died in a nice mobo accident, he arose as my new k6-2.....ALL HAIL FERRYMAN .
I once worked in an English Dept. lab where the computers were named after figures of speech: "Allegory", "Metonymy", "Hyperbole", "Synecdoche", etc.... it was a small lab, fortunately.
--Riff
You could use Norse gods when the Roman gods namespace is exhausted.
Here, we name our servers after dead rockstars.
So far we have
Elvis (The King is the main web server)
Janis
Buddy
Big Bopper
I enjoy it. The machines seem to take on the personality of the sames. Elvis is a fat bloated beast, high on cheeseburgers, whilst Janis's throaty burr has been the undoing of many a company Sys/op.
In the past we have had
Kurt, Sid, Nancy, Jimmy.
For a recent addition to the family, I voted for 'Mama Cass', but sadly my proposal was rejected.
I use JRRT names as well, if you take in the whole body of work (inc. the tegwar) not only do you stand little chance of ever running out of names, you can make them up as well.... this was posted form Mirkwood, lothlorien.psouth.net is my personall web server (go there for a short explanation) and aldalome is my home system... i have also used many other names, including palithar (sp? i will have to check) for a laptop used as a web-cam system on a bouy... Rob Waite ecolink@psouth.net
Then there's the lucky person who had a mailbox on getta.life.org
My new laptop is names Qantassaurus. Haven't gotten used to that one yet.
tjgrant posting as AC: We named all our boxes after characters in the Chronicles of Narnia. mr-tumnus (firewall) the first character Lucy met on entering Narnia aslan (main server) the guy who runs the show caspian (mothballed NetWare box) the good prince whitewitch (NT box) 9Gb of MP3 files reepicheep (notebook running Linux)
Avoids questions like: Did you mean teddy.corporate.company.com, teddy.west.company.com, or teddy.rd.company.com?
Of course we have an 8 character formula, so it's nowhere near as unwieldy as your examples.
Looking at the name, you can instantly deduce the site, machine class, and vendor. (if you know the scheme) The disadvantage is that people "not in the know" think it's gibberish.
The school uses a variety of standard conventions previously named (greek/roman gods, colors, planets) for other things. -Hober (too lazy to login)
Jeremiah, who I worked with several jobs ago, named his machine "bullfrog" ...
(RIP Hoyt Axton)
Larry, Shemp, Moe and Curly
My favorite was one of the Aero/Astro clusters at MIT. There were seven computers and one printer. The computers were named after the seven dwarves. What was the printer named? Why, Snow White, of course!
The most impersonal naming conventions occured at a company I worked for during the summers. My server was called nc613ws2. This broke down to mean the following:
nc: North Central section of the building floor
613: Floor 6, room 13
ws1: Work Station #2 in that particular room
You can guess how horrible my assigned user name had to be. bah!
-benjy
This probably won't mean anything to anyone who has not been in New Orleans in Februrary... In my last job, we named the computers after Mardi Gras Parade Krewes. The DNS server was Zulu, the web server Rex and the home server Elks. The database servers were Endimion, Baccus and Orpheus. There were plenty of names for the desktops, but there was a scramble for everyone's favorite parade. Andrew Robinson
In our lab we have Crow, Tomservo, Gypsy, Bobo, Pearl, DrForrester, TVsFrank, BrainGuy, Gamera, Godzilla, MrBNatural, EdWood, SandyFrank, JetJaguar, Manos, Torgo, and many, many others. Nameservice can be fun!
Real horrorshow...
I've got: Pris Zhora Leon Rachel Gaff Roy Rick J.F. and Eldon A friend of mine is using Anime characters from his favorite Anime films.
Given the latest Slashdot article about IDG's efforts to protect its "For Dummies" trademark from being used in listserv postings, you might want to permission from Eisner before servers after Disney characters.
Let's hope Disney lawyers don't get any ideas from this post.
Nuff said... the possibilites are endless and growing every day! jihad.example.org militia.bar.net etc...
first-post.slashdot.org !!!
(followed by some luser who writes:
second-post.domain.com !!!
Got it, beeyatches!
Marijuana Herion Crack Smack Coke Speed Whizz Hash Weed Pot Pills Acid LSD Amphetamine E Gear 9Bar The when you you ask which machine the user is currently on, you'll get an interesting reponse. Brad
We use names of swedish cartoon figures as the name of our servers. But we have quite a relaxed nameing convention. No one has the right to bitch about the names we give to servers as long as we run them .. if they wanna name them something else they take care of them .. that usuaully shuts people up that doesn't like the names.
I prefer to name my systems after prisons (People seem to remember the machine name better that way :) Federal & the state you reside in do the best IMO. For example I have: Folsom Bellevue Attica SingSing Rikers SanQuentin
And of course, who's in charge of the Render Farm? Old_Macdonald.
I still like my boxes:
Hookah
Shisha
Nargile
Here at school we've got all sorts of naming conventions. Most of our "real" servers are named after ancient egyptian gods (eg amon, osiris, isis, anubis, etc). The math professors' Suns are one, two, three, etc. The chem SGIs are all named after elements. And so on.
Having a coherent naming scheme is not only fun but useful: when a user says something like "I can't log into krypton" I at least know what I'm dealing with (IRIX, in this case). Using names like sparcstationnumber234 isn't just obnoxious, it's an organizational mess despite the effort to the contrary.
We also used this scheme, (so far: ale, bock and stout) when we started populating our offices with Linux boxen in `94. In particular, the name ``bock'' has great room for upgrading as when the single CPU machine goes to a dual CPU, you can rename it ``duppel-bock''.
I did that. The first name on my network was dis. My dead laptop is mercury, my old 486, now permanently dead, was cronus, and I've saved cerberus or janus for a router for when my home network gets a link to outside.
I've strayed away from the naming scheme, though. Dis was renamed to evil only weeks after installation, and my new laptop is tertia (it's the third laptop I've gone through). I may return to a mythological naming scheme if I resurrect mercury, as I'm contemplating the names lazarus and osiris for it.
You must have fun with newbies and talk(1).
Message from god@heaven at 12:45 29 Oct 1999:
....
I'm coming for your soul at 3:00 this afternoon.
Ours are named after charcters in the Green Mile (short story series by Stephen King)
Edgecombe
Coffey
Delacroix
Mr. Jingles
My home network has all the machines named with hydrocarbons (i think?):
:)
octane
pentane
hexane
methane
heptane
At work, however, we have creative names like:
office01
office02
And a few really creative ones on peoples personal machines:
miracle
mirabelle
defcon6
Creative bunch we are!
jason
If you name a machine after its function, what happens when the machine no longer serves that function? E.g. We have a mail server here named "dns1" - it used to do DNS, but that's no longer its function.
The functional names (mail, dns, ftp, www) of the machines should be listed in DNS as CNAMEs.
For the record, at my former employer we used names of pagan deities. Where I am now we use animal names.
--
I've got a "cybil", too... Cyrix machine... at the time I named her, she multi-booted Linux, OS/2, Win95, and DOS. Down to just Linux now, but the name stuck...
My other machines:
lynn: My first Linux box.
xena and gabrielle: an XT and the Linux box that routes ARCnet for it.
deliah: A Dell.
arienrhod: Built out of parts that came out of cybil (that really should be the other way around).
amanda, tessa, and anne: The Macs.
There's also anastasia, cassandra, cloe, and eddi, who haven't got humor buried in their names...
Oh, and I named my workstation at work grover. The box is from Big Blue, and I work for a PBS station... (We've also got an oscar, and we had an elmo for a while.)
Being an aviation buff, back in college when I took a Fortran programming class, I named my program assignments after the NATO codenames for the famous Soviet MiG fighters: Fresco, Farmer, Fishbed, Flogger, Foxbat.
Yeah, it wasn't very practical and it got a not too approving reaction from the instructor, but at least it sounded cooler than 'ASSIGN1', etc.
The NATO codenames were colorful yet cryptic, and with a system behind them: B for bombers, C for cargo (transports), F for fighters, and so on, with one syllable for propeller aircraft and two for jets.
These days, if I were setting up a network I'd probably just go with Simpsons characters.
The VAX has got to be Brezhnev. The last of the old-guard dinosaurs.
>>>
I'm currently looking for a famous Russian rocket scientist for a third.
>>>
Is "Tsiolkovsky" too long or cumbersome to type?
The problem I see is that it's just a hodgepodge of those Japanese terms that are to some degree familiar to Westerners (or at least Japanophiles), with no coherent theme. The foods are fine, but after that, what do death-by-overworking, rice wine, and gangsters have to do with each other or anything??
You should have stuck with the food theme - there's plenty more, after all. But at least I don't see the really cheesy ones like geisha, karate, and Godzilla.
Around my university labs. Had a room of seven... for the Abbott and Costello fun of it, they are who, what, where, why, when, which, and how. Have another room (12) with Chinese Zodiac signs. Though not the reverse-name, I love the ability to 'telnet cock'. Didn't some university have a lab where all the machines had STD names (syphillis, gonhereea, etc)?
The good points:
The bad points:On the other hand, the US sent some monkeys in space too, and one of them was called ham... ham or hal? the confusion would be quite deadly ;-)
Anyway, with a masquerading firewall, I could setup my own domain, my own naming convention without being bothered by anybody. From the outside all my computers are called by00..something
Go wild, after all those servers mean much more to you than they do to the marketing department, so why should you let them choose a name for your babies ;^)
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
You should have settled down for names of places, not names of the ancient ones!
Kaddath, brunswick, boston, r'lyeh... much safer if you ask me ;-)
BTW, what is azathoth doing? is this the machine I should hax00r in if I were a hA>oR skr1pT keedY? :-)
---
"Hasta la victoria siempre!" El Comandante
A certain college uses names of gods for it's boxen, tyr, loki, thor, odin, etc. You can name boxes according to what the gods were known for. Works pretty good.
I can just see it now:
: Some script kiddie is flood-pinging Noah
: I have a job running on Job
: lucifer has been moved downstairs
: Someone should put the covers back on Adam and Eve, they're getting dirty
: I'll be right back as soon as I finish typing 10 more commands into Moses
: I keep pinging, but I can't seem to find Jesus
PearlyGate would make a good firewall.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
For example: "lemur" for a DNS server. "camel" for an apache webhost that has a lot of mod-perl being used. Well, you get the idea.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
We've got all the obvious ones like Orkney, Skye, Arran, etc for the more prestigious machines like file servers.
;)
;)
My little NT machine is Sandray - which I am reliably informed is a small island with a couple of mountains and an abandoned cottage. Ironic?
Of course as time goes on we run short on islands. I recently turned an old 486 into a Linux web/database server without any keyboard. It's called Mousa and is marked on the map as being barely habitable....
The system is self regulating too. Everytime we buy a new machine, out comes the Texaco map of Scotland and before we get an IP address we have to find an unused island. I wonder if a time will come when we are forced to tip large numbers of rocks into the sea just to create a name
See what Pair Networks names their servers.
(see the bottom of the page for a note on naming)
...end of transmission...
Sycorax
;)
Caliban
Prospero
Miranda
Ariel
Trinculo
...this is my home network, so there will be more when I get more boxen
I name new boxes at work after musicians you might have heard of:
parsons
holdsworth
kraftwerk
zappa
etc.
I have a lame Sun (4/110) I named "sol", and a workstation named "lister".
--
When was the last time you sat through a Linux boot and upon execution of "scandisk" were required to hit "Fix" fourty-one-thousand and three times because the UI designers decided it would be too hard to add a "Fix All" button? e2fsck -p, my friend.
--
So a friend of mine had a network with the typical "planet" names ... So there was sol as the server, with earth, mars, etc, etc, etc. Machine number 12 (9 planets + luna and sol) was named "apes" ...
...
Needless to say, not enough people got it.
My network is heinlein-based. My desktop is job, my g/fs desktop is mycroft. I named a bunch of macs jubal, lazarus and michael. Then I ran out of names, so I named the next desktop crooked and the laptop they
slimey?~ ^~
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~^~
But I thought I's share some I haven't seen mentioned.
^ ~~^~
One is describing relaxed states.
onlawn (my favorite)
thepier (looks like a cool theatrical character too)
byfire
inbed
fishinhole
downstream
splashfoot
One I've used at work is childhood toy conventions
Transformers
optimus
mirage
megatron
rodimus
Gi Joe, (can't remember some right now)
Barbie (for the geek-chicks)
or one place I saw had things you can do to a ball
punt
kick
slam
spike
dunk
pop
inflate
^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~~
Is he dead or just the punch cards? ;>
A little spartan perhaps, but it does convey the machine's purpose and number in a series.
Of course, an entry in your /etc/hosts file and you can call 'em anything you want. :)
Ra, khefren/cheops, tutankhamen, hetshepsut, amenhotep, cleopatra, nefertiti, amen, anubis, anuket, aten, atum, bast, horus, hathor, imhotep, isis, maat, osiris, sekhmet, set, thoth, etc.
If I see one more "apollo" or "zeus" server, I think I'll puke... ;>
I'd rather telnet to "HollyGoodhead" and "Domino" and "AlottaFagina" (err, Austin Powers) and such... ;>
Yeah, Sun has some whacky code names. As someone mentioned, the "Happy Meal" NIC, "Carrera, Sirius, Pegasus, RoadRunner, Sunrise, Campus, Sunergy, Sunray, Phoenix, Calvin, Node Warrior, Hobbes, Gypsy" and so on, to name a few.
I call my home Sparc, "Ra." :)
I have several fantasy worlds that exist in maps and descriptions only. I use Elven cities for my network at home. Sharlai, Entessi, Retasha, Burshanna are the existing four. There are at least another four if and when the machine count gets that high. (The same maps are good for passwords, too, being unpublished.)
One clever scheme at guy a work was using was the names of people who've left. The range is literally endless!
Wade.
Wade.
Dude, that's what Network Information Databases like NIS, Tivoli, OpenView, etc. are for!
_ _____
Don't try to force all the info that is supposed to be in a large database into a 8 char hostname.
The rule of thumb for ***EVERY*** environment is to use a peculiar name for the hostname and an alias for the formal name, but remember to make all mappings to the formal name!
Of course, if you have a big chunk of machines with the same function, like in labs, you use an enumerated peculiar name like, "guineo001"
_______________________________________________
One trick I like is to come up with names that can fit into 2 (Or more groups of ideas) For example if you had 2 servers named "Calvin" and "Hobbes" you could name your next servers after some of the other Calvin and Hobbes charecters. Or you could name them things like "Luther" and "Huss" and after other Rennisanse thinkers. Lets you do fun leaps of logic.
Erlang Developer and podcaster
A friend who worked as a consultant in Chicago said his client's network was named after famous Chicago pizza joints;
Gino
Uno
Due
Connie
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"John Wayne was a fag"
"he was too you boys"
"a few years ago, I was doing this contracting job, installing two-way mirrors in his house, and he came to the door wearing a dress"
(from Repo Man - one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies of all time)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Cybil (multi-boot machine; Cybil1, Cybil2, Cybil3)
Ice9 (obvious)
Rastamon
Gump
Rocinante (my only Linux box)
Ciguri
(bonus to anyone who can tell me where Ciguri comes from - hint, it proves that I was only kidding about my anti-French tirade)
I wish I had a nickel for every time someone said "Information wants to be free".
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I'd just like to remind everybody that recycling a name, that is, giving a name to a new computer that had been previously used on an old computer, is very immoral and should not be permitted. For example, if you have a box called "Fusion" and you get an entirely new computer you cannot name that computer "Fusion" just because it is replacing the old computer (hi Psychos :P) You must pick a new name for the new computer.
Of course this leads to the question of upgrades? What if all the disks are replaced, or a new OS is installed on the disks? What if the CPU is replaced with a faster one? Of course cases last forever if you treat them well and a case could conceivably contain one computer and then an entirely new one. I believe the best resolution to this issue is that the motherboard owns the name. That is, the name is associated with the computer's motherboard, and any time an upgrade goes so far as to replacing the motherboard, that is when the computer becomes a different computer, and a new name must be found.
I'm not a smorgasbord.
At my previous job, our DNS and backup mail server was an old 486 running Linux 1.2.13. The name of this computer was great... linus
Where I work, we really *do* have a server named Titanic. It has that heavy grey-and-black industrial look that reminds you of the actual sailing vessel. Its a Data General machine, as big as a refridgerator, with an suprisingly puny laptop screen that folds out of the middle of it. Oh, and it runs NT, adding to the "flop" metaphorical value.
:=)
The head of the department who bought it essentially had no choice: He could only get clearance for the purchase of the one Data General machine, and not on getting several reasonably priced servers. I fugure that the naming of the machine to "Titanic" was his way of getting a little justice.
I've named every machine I've ever owned, starting with a Macintosh Plus called "Ad Astra". Later I replaced him with Falcon, toted a laptop named Sarabande, and replaced him with Lilie, who was much cuter. My DOS using friends all thought this was a crackpot thing to do; their computers tended to have names like "the computer". And the idea of a machine's personality having gender amused them, though it seemed quite natural to me (why would we call a cool new machine "sexy" if it didn't have a sex?).
:-)
I always speculated that DOS and Windows users didn't name their machines because the clone PCs they used had no personality...
Times have changed. It seems like "power users" on all platforms like to name their machines now. I suspect this has something to do with increased familiarity with Unix-land and networking, and perhaps also with the rise of build-it-yourself PCs. Not hard to see how people would feel like naming a box they'd built up from parts.
Back on the topic: the company I used to work for was MountainGate, which made the choice of machine-naming convention automatic. I worked on dana, tressider, snowking, and skiddaw. Arrarat ran the DNS, k2 was the CVS repository, and Everest was a four-processor SGI Challenge-L that sat in the corner and did nothing. It worked well, and new employees got nice and familiar with the atlas.
The LAN at home isn't nearly so organized. If you can think up a naming scheme that explains Falcon 2, Lizard, Moria, Crowley, Aziraphale, and Carmen Bellona, please let me know!
-Mars
Ok, this is my little beef. It makes it easier for you to take care of the machines when the names are easily predictable. Unfortunately, it only makes sense when you treat all machines as equal. The people who use workstations do not think of their machines as equal.
... but before, I used to type DWINGERT - first initial, last name. Me being the covert person I am change my name back every time they tried to change my machine to asset tagdom.
... that information could be kept in a database elsewhere. In fact, it is even here. You can't remember that machine with asset tag 002222 is assigned to Daniel Chapman. You have to look it up. But guess what, if you need the machine name for Daniel Chapman you can guess that it is probably named DCHAPMAN. (Oh yes, we do have the BSMITH problem. in the old days, They started to add numbers after the name : BSMITH1, BSMITH2, etc. It's useful in our primarily windows based environment for "find machine")
When I want to access my coworker's disk down the cube row (because we're sharing a piece of code) then I have to ask him what his machine number is (by asset tag) over and over. Eventually, I learn that his asset tag is AA-002223
Now, we have "servers" that the administrators think are workstations... why? Because they're developmental servers, but are not administrated by the network administrators. I want my compile server named "Ogma" or something like that, so I can refer to it as Ogma. Everyone knows how to find a shared drive on Brahhma or Siva... but Ogma has the name AA-00422 or something. See, I can't even remember it now. You know what I end up using? IP address. Why? Only two numbers ever change in the IP address. The machine names should be easier to remember than the IP address for heaven's sake.
So, keep in mind
The VAX must be Rasputin (hairy, strange, but suprisingly hard to kill)
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
The Math and CS department at Drexel University (my alma mater), uses some names from stories by Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland).
There is King, Queen, Rabbit, Cheshire, Jabberwocky, Walrus, and some others.
We have a server named "bugs"... it has a nasty habit of living up to its name :-)
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
How about:
Caliban
Montague
Capulet
Hamlet
Horatio
Benvolio
or
Zeno
Plato
Aristotle
Madonna
or even
Hippocampus
Medulla
Amygdala
Thalmus
ParamesencephalicBasalCistern
And My personal favorites
FistOfTheFireMonkey
EarOfTheWindPig
MaxillaryPalpOfTheStrontiumLocust
The latter would make wonderful management print server. ;)
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
The naming rule in cubicle land is that titles are given out according to the arbitrary whim of people who thing that "impactfull" is an English word. Terms properly reserved for professionals are given out as arbitraryily as titles like "Senior Executive Assitant Vice President." I, for example, am officially designated as a "Program Engineer" though I have no idea what a "Program Engineer" might be. I personally prefer "software developer" over "Software Engineer" or "Programmer" when asked. I've suggested on several occaisons that "thaumaturg" would be expressive, and no other profession is currently using it. Perhaps the "Network Engineers" could insist on being called "Network Alchemists." ;)
[-- Trust the Monkey --]
Uh hello! subdomians?
cheech.imgs.sfo.xxxx
chong.imgs.sfo.xxxx
sulu.dnld.lax.xxx
kirk.dnld.lax.xxx
spock.dnld.lax.xxx
skipper.auth.chi.xxxx
ginger.auth.chi.xxxx
professor.auth.chi.xxxx
THis is way better then the L3servauth4.xxxx crap we had before I got here.
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
Go look at Genesis 10 from the KJV.
I started using this scheme when I acquired an old VT terminal named "nimrod" (it had a label that said so) and needed something to name my new linux box that I was hooking this terminal up to. So my box became "cush". When I re-habilitated an old 386 to be my scratch, testing box it became "seba".
If for some reason Genesis 10 doesn't have enough names for you, start in on 1 Chronicles.
Another advantage of this scheme is that there are some who feel that logging into a server named "zeus" or "athena" is somehow doing homage to a pagan god. These names are straight out of the bible, and they're minor enough characters that no one is going to be offended that you're insulting some great leader by naming the server that. (I can just imagine the uproar over naming a server "jesus")
And while I admit that Hazarmaveth is a bit hard to pronounce or, more importantly, type, there are plenty of easily useable names in there.
It might have been written as onesingleword, or it had a hyphen, I can't remember exactly.
But it was a win98/NT machine most of the time, that's when it wasn't running Be or FreeBSD or whatever my flatmate put on it.
At uni the machines in my office were all named after Scotch whisky brands. Quite good for a Scottish university. Scales reasonably well.
A recent discussion on this topic with friends suggested obscure mathematicians/physicists. Try logging in to Euler, Descarte or Green. This will scale very well.
But my favourite, the one we had in my old flat, was to name the machines after sex positions. Missionary, Doggie, 69, Not_tonight (a very common one!) and of course the best idea was for the server to be called Nympho (not strictly a position but related, so forgive me) because it was always turned on!
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They never seem to run out. (But if they do I'll branch out into Chinese foods. ;) )
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
- Herbie.ucs.indiana.edu (still in service; hosts our FTP mirror and Web pages)
- Bud.ucs.indiana.edu
et al.Desktop machines, for a while, were named after Jimi Hendrix songs (until the Jimi fan moved to Colorado-- Brett, if you're out there, greets!)
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
- dev
- null
- coredump
et cetera, et cetera... but my very favorite was- quit
So when you were doing an interactive nslookup and typed "quit", you would get its record.Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
By the way, this is a parody of a T.S. Elliot poem from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats--a good read (which was turned into a really sucky musical).
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
- Quosone
- Iriquois
- Cherokee
et cetera... but I hate to say what happened to them: They were moved off their land and replaced by NT workstations. Another noble culture gone... talk about irony.--Q,
who still regrets what his state's founders did...
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product
during my grad school days, i opted to be the department sys admin instead of doing the traditional TA things (also mostly because there were no traditional TA things like teaching or lecturing for me to do). i choose to call my machines (NeXT workstations and some office PCs thrown in for variety) after physicists who made significant contributions to radiological science. I had workstations named Roentgen, Curie, Bohr, Becquerel, Rutherford, Tesla, Anger. i've also used other physicists like newton and hubble.
i think names add character to the workstations. certainly much more interesting than meaningless borg-like designations used by the IT group of the hospital i'm at now (i have no involvement in IT or sys admining anymore). although i suppose for all these Windoze office peecees, a borg designation might be appropriate...:)
imabug
"For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and Long Words Bother Me"
Yup; I got nailed for using this one. I had a large MySQL server sitting next to our Sybase boxes, and since this one was a free piece of software, I named the initial install 'freebase'. It didn't go over too well :-)
Here at dN (where ./ is hosted, BTW, :) ) we have several thousand servers in our two datacenters. It's a hell of a lot easier to keep track of linux360, cobalt942 or web773 than it is slappy, apollo, and gilgamesh. Most people who swear by creative naming schemes never had to manage huge number of machines before. "Which one's gilgamesh? I don't know. It's on one of these rows of racks..."
I used to use a Red Dwarf naming convention.. :)
Now I'm on MST3k... but if I ever need to start
a new network that could get big, I'll use
Pokemon names -- 151 (or more) names should work
for at least a class C subnet
kryten - IP Masquerading/Internet Junkbuster gw
holly - Old main workstation, PPro200
forrester - New main workstation, Alpha533
cat - Auxillary workstation, Alpha166
toaster - Bed workstation, NeXTTurboMono
frank - Laptop, iBook
erhardt - Large noisy toy, PDP/11
I also have 2 unnamed 8086 machines...
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
london office (synths):
...
;-)
fenix prophet5 tr505 darkstar wasp pulse fatman tb303 spirit sonic6 teebee bit warehouse schaltwerk kitten omni jv1080 jupiter6 tr808 tr909
german office (clubs):
warehouse ultraschall omen
people seem to have problems remembering the names, but I am root
Soleil
Ajax
Zeus
Artemis
Plutus
Brutus
Caesar
Icarus
etc. etc....
It's nice to be a little creative incertain areas of your job. It makes it a little less like work.
----------------
"Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds." - Albert Einstein
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
hehe, I like it, and so do my friends, 'tidlywinks', and I'll keep going like that.
A friend uses a linux machine as a dial-up router, he thought 'nerdbox' was appropriate
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
I'm proud to say that at my work I have the liberty to use star wars names. Anyone who knows anything about star wars will soon understand why we chose some of the names.
:-)
For instance our web servers are Darth Maul and Darth Sidious because they are badass mofos. The development boxes are Kenobi and Skywalker because they were both developing Jedi's. Our switches are Anakin and Lando because they switch sides. Our racks are Mos Eisley and Coruscant because they are the places to go when you need stuff. Oh yeah, our development database is Padme because its a sexy VALinux box.
My Slashdot account is old enough to drink...
Yelm, Issaries, Dorasta, Orlanth, Urox, Pavis etc etc etc.
Orlanth's my box.
Deleted
In my high school, the boxen in the English level computer lab were named after famous writers and the boxen in the science computer lab were scientists. I thought it was appropiate that the three Dells (in a sea of powermacs) were Newton, Einstein, and Hawking. (the three guys Data played poker with in "Descent".) The Linux server was Lorien, but I never could get anyone to tell me why.
- My box: Defiant (fighting the good fight against the Borg)
- My notebook: Yukon (a DS9 runabout; it got taken over by a changling and got toasted by Defiant; at first, it ran Windows 95)
- A hideously underpowered server: Ganges (another DS9 runabout, this one from the early days of the show)
Other boxen in the Commune:- Nerys (she has an attitude, possibally because she dual-boots to Windows 95 and BeOS)
- Seven (of Nine) (she's still assimilated)
- Zhaan (from Farscape)
My college names its boxen after Peanuts charcters: Snoopy, Charlie, Marcie... The one Linux server is Harriet; we should have gotten Linus, but the library took the name first.Welcome to zeus.mycompany.com
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania NT box #1
zeus login:
(ok, so nt boxen typically don't have issues. so sue me.)
I use names of man made objects that
are sent into space.
Magellan, Discovery, Endeavour, etc...
Hiryu
Akagi
Musashi
Yamato
etc.
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Nephi
Lehi
Korihor
Helaman
Mahonrimoriankomer
Adam-God
Kolob
"Reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinions; only the people have that right." - Mao
Give your servers those annoying names that they want, but then set up aliases on your DNS and call them whatever you want. The employer will be happy and so will you.
I had to do this at my last job (sort of).
--
I live in the ocean
Four-digit slashdot ID. Recognize.
This seems a popular theme, we had it too
Ivan, trotsky, bukharin, brezhnev, kirov
At my old job I had a short-lived naming scheme based on different types of garbage
sludge.nist.gov, flotsam.ncsl.nist.gov, jetsam.ncsl.nist.gov. You can imagine not everyone was in favor of this.
Well, I *was* going to point this out. :)
/.-grrls can call their LAN nodes by
/.-grrls. I usually picture slashdot as being somewhat like the A/V club in high school. :D
I suppose
boring hideous male names. For instance:
joe
eugene
clarence
francis
harold
As a side note, it's nice to know that there *are*
Some naming conventions I've seen:
1. Star Trek: TNG. eg. Mail server is called Guinan.
2. The solar System: Earth, Venus, jupiter, Mars, etc. (dunno, specific functions.)
3. South Park.
4. Different model Cars. eg. Viper, Dual PIII Work station.
5. Naming after kids... (boring unless, its your kids.)
Do not read this
One rant I have about naming conventions is that for some reason, in my experience, everybody has got to have *one* server called 'hermes'. I'm sure there's some clever reason why, but it does sound like a sexually transmitted disease. (There's an idea - name each server after a sexually transmitted disease).
As for naming conventions, perhaps biblical characters will have the necessary gravitas to sway the powers that be? I've seen types of cheeses but that was just strange. Whether you consider the bible your first port of call for guidance or whether you consider it a story (this debate has been played out in comments about Katz's articles), the names were fantastic and they all had roles. Funky graphics could be a problem, I concede.
It's funny how in business things have to be 'official' and 'professional'. It strikes me that it is this hankering after legitimacy that leads people to think it is Good to call a server 'S_ENT_450_0002_324923349' when they could just call it 'guanaco' and make everybodies day better. (Camelid names, while a good theme, run out after about 6 or so). This is probably the same tiresome hankering after legitimacy that means we spend more time auditing our work than doing it.
thenerd
Hi to Dave Hughes and Ed the Lech. When hell freezes over I'll ski there too.
The camels are coming. I'm in love.
The trick is to come up with names that hard to pronounce for people working in other offices.
...richie - It is a good day to code.
...and, thusly, our machines are named after various things japanese. Let's see:
;)
The firewall machines are ninja, samurai, and judoka. The servers, sushi, sashimi, and wasabi. Workstations are mostly sushi dishes: tekkadon, kabayaki, ikura, nigiri... my own box is named unagi. At some point we ran out of fish, so now we also have karoshi, seppuku, sake, ryouko, yakuza etc. My home machines, mostly used for playful stuff, are go and sokoban.
I haven't seen that scheme before; I think, however, that it has numerous advantages: it sounds cool, it's really hard to run out of names, and it might even teach you a tiny bit of japanese on the side, while trying to come up with appropriate names.
Is anyone else using that, too?
Why not marry the two together? spock0001, spock0002, etc
the real at&t mix
Heh... at our little local network we're still trying to come up with a consistant scheme but my favorite is our firewall, 'Zuul'. And of course, my dual-boot linux/Win95 system is named Wellington/Napoleon, respectively. And then there's the dual processor NT system named 'MCP'...
At work, we make submarines, so we use names of former submarines for our servers. Marlin, skate, sanfran, mero, edison, seawolf, etc. We also do fish, skate, clam, pomodon, sunfish. I don't know where poppy and tulip came from...
At home, I started with Chaos from Zelazny's Amber Chronicles, we had Amber, Rebma, TheKeep, Avalon, and TirNa also.
Then I moved out, and took Chaos with me, and added Entropy later. Soemtime after, I named my laptop Mud (my name is mud...) and followed that with Slime. Recently I got into naming things after cats, so I have tiger, lion, cougar, panther, cheetah, lynx, and bobcat.
And I really think the creative names help - we have lots of trouble remembering stuff like 121583 - our NT workstations are named after their asset numbers. Which sucks.
- Kazin
My dad, when faced with the problem of naming new servers, has a few rules:
For example, when he got a bunch of new Sun boxes, he named them for various Sun gods: Apollo, Ra, Utu, etc.
Personally, I name computers for their personalities. My Mac is strong and slow to anger -- hence, it is fangorn. My Linux box exists only to take notes -- hence, it is scribe.
Use CNAMES and call the servers whatever you want, multiple names and such. For yourselfe give it fun names like:l s
:)
Gilligan,MaryAnn,Professor,Skipper,Ginger,Howel
but also call them
www,mail,www2,fileserver,radius,ldap, etc.
The machines should respond to both names just fine. Why be limited?
For myself I use Star Wars locations for machine names (hopefully Lucas doesn't see this and sue me or something.)
Yavin is my main machine, I also have Hoth and Tatooine, and Bespin is my laptop.
-jay
I used to do software testing for Spry (makers of Internet in a Box - anyone remember that?) - when we started getting our machines in, I named the first test webserver 'Mars', and it stuck. So the big machine with lots of RAM & HD space became Jupiter, and so on. We had a little 386sx piece of junk for testing slow machines/connection - that became Pluto.
Well, one day we got a Packard Bell in - of course there was only one thing we could name it.
Wait for it...
You got it: Uranus.
When I started work at my current job the servers were all called i.e. ROSEBERY1, ROSEBERY2, etc.
This sucked, obviously.
After much whining from me, we have switched to 'Animal names that have a slight air of silliness about them'
i.e.
vole
llama
sheep
otter
skunk
marmoset
slow_loris (reserved for a future NT box)
etc.
it isn't perfect, but it will have to do until I talk them round to 'minor characters from Star Wars' or 'Gods of the Cthulhu Mythos'.
-- Stu
I've named my two servers after teas: Chai and Oolong.
Another guy I know has 6 servers and has used other tea names for his, so that we don't collide.
-
My network at home is named after songs from the Jethro Tull album "Broadsword and the Beast."
This produces some interesting side effects:
beastie: firewall/print-server, mean little NetBSD/mac68k machine
broadsword: My big LinuxPPC box, I love sitting at a "broadsword~$" prompt
clasp: Linux/x86 laptop (you can clasp it)
pussywillow: My wife's computer (I don't think she knows what to make of it, but I keep telling her it's a compliment)
cheerio: Alpha file/MP3/squid server
slowmarchingband: Windows machine (SMB, get it?)
sealdriver: Old Quadra for Mac-only applications, stormy and self-absorbed
Some of the machines where I work are called:
Batman sounds: bang, pow, zap
Hardware: nut, bolt, ratchet
Weather: lightning, hail, elnino, thunder
Printer names: low_toner, offline, jammed
Things like "mount nut:/scratch" are common.
--
Steven Webb
System Administrator II - Juneau and TECOM projects
NCAR - Research Applications Program
Just a suggestion for anyone in need of a new naming convetion (albeit an inherently limited set):
I've decided to start naming machines in devzero.org after the seven deadly sins... so far I have sloth (my primary work box), envy (my machine at home which I'm always convinced is never quite up to the standards of my one at work), and pride (which is just a cname for www). I'm not sure who is going to be lust yet...
I plan on putting OBSD on an old box to use as a new firewall for my home network. I think it's going to be wrath.
If your employer still insists on numbering your PC's just do it in a different language (Babelfish might be helpful here). That way, it sounds cooler, and is at least slightly educational, which you can challenge your boss with if he dost protest too much. And while you're at it, you might as well choose names from any other word in foreign languages, occasionally sneaking in "merde" or "puta". Too bad we can't use Cyrillic, ÁÅÒÏÆÌÏÔ would be a good one...
Most people have a good clue what the first 18 are. You can name up to half a class C with it. It is unique enough that each person can remember the names of machines without confusion. It has little sexual bias or other connotations, unlike series like authors and inventors in which you may end up picking too many males and be accused of sexist names. There are a reasonable number of really cool sounding element names in the series, unlike trees. They sound reasonably professional.
--Karl
It's really hard to give your servers meaningful names and still keep within a scheme, so I've more or less given up. :)
At home, my machines are named after galaxies. Right now I'm using orion (which seems to be very popular on the net), and andromeda. I mostly chose this scheme because it sounds cool. Originally I named them after planets (Jupiter One and Saturn) and each harddrive on them was mounted under names for their respective moons (atlas, titan, europa, callisto, etc.).
At work, our servers are named after birds. We're using eagle, thunderbird, raven, and falcon right now. Unfortunately, our web server is just "www" and our name server is "ns." This scheme was actually imposed not by us (the IT department) but by upper management. Our school has was founded by (and is still partially government funded by) natives, and so management wanted to retain some of that "feel." We just rolled in a new NT server who someone on staff wanted to call Phoenix. I said, "there's no way I'm going to give an NT server a cool name like Phoenix." :)
A friend of mine names all his servers after the seven dwarfs. This is probably the most interesting convention I've seen, and you can give your servers meaningful names. An NT server would be dopey. Solaris server would be grumpy. Novell server would be sneezy. Linux server would of course be Doc. :)
So, it's difficult (but probably not impossible) to come up with fun and meaningful names, but I've given up on that. Just give your servers entertaining names and don't worry about making sure they mean anything. You'll remember that foobar is your name server, and the new guy will learn that too. :)
Jason.Upon getting our first server, we decided (and the "boss" came up with the idea) to name our servers after the male organ! =g=
So, we have/could have woody, johnson, richard, oh the list goes on. Of course, for practicality, I have cnames pointing to the services, ie mail, ns, etc.
As long as we don't get TOO carried away and use boner, wanker, c***, etc... it's damn funny.
It's cool to say "I'm gonna check on johnson's uptime." I was hoping for cool cartoon characters, but I can't say I mind not getting what I wanted in this case.
I have two machines at home, DeiMoS and PHoBoS, the names of Mars' two moons. I did this some time ago and have since had a few other machines come and go while these have stayed. Saturn and Jupiter have gone to work and Pluto is currently deceased awaiting resurrection.
I like the idea of using JRR Tolkien's characters as machine names. Gandalf the grey, the wise wizard, is clearly cut out to be a DNS, Bilbo, the homely one, is a great web server. Troll is the firewall, and I'm sure i could pick out a good dwarf name for the radius server...
Alexander.I say I ain't giving you no tree fiddy you goddamned Loch Ness monster, get yo own goddamned money!
I use a number of different conventions.
My primary computer lab uses 1980s Television show titles. Nothing like logging in to "ateam" or "familyties".
The other, larger, lab, uses names related to cyberpunk literature and the movie, "Bladerunner". Names include such titles as, "dexedrine", "batty" and "chatsubo"
As for servers, I generally try to follow the convetion for the labs. I have a "gongshow" as well as an "AC" and a "DC" (get it?). fun fun fun!
Our campus central IT dept requests most machine names to be of the form [building][floor][room][machine number] leading to dull names like fyb052000002. So for my new linux cluster I decided on something else.
The server is called 'icefloe', and the compute nodes are named after penguins. So I've got a bunch of penguins on an icefloe. Currently only chinstrap is keeping a lonely vigil on the icefloe, but I'll get king, emperor, adelie, gentoo and all the others up one day. I must stop reading slashdot and do some work...
At NCSSM (www.ncssm.edu), the Suns (and later, HPs), were name based around the LOTR mythos.
;)
iluvatar, glorfindel, pippin, sauron, gandalf, etc, etc
the windows 3.1 (now NT) boxen had names too, but this forum might have children reading it, and besides, those were never officially sanctioned names.
"and no, im not the spot working for Transmeta, although i wish i was..." -- ~spot "i'm the epitome of public enemy..."
I know of one company that uses element names. Everything also has a one or two letter alias (the standard symbol, e.g. H, He, Li, etc.), and the last octet of the IP address is the atomic number.
rant
Although as soon as you veer away from glenlivet, glenmorangie and cragganmore, on to the ones with original Gaelic spellings the chances of incorrect connection attempts because people can't remember the inscrutible letter order.
Still, one of way of keeping things secure.
--
"I do not speak for my employers, though they are controlled from my Teddy's huge pulsating brain."
My home LAN domain name is beast.net, and the host names come from cheesy Japanese sci-fi monsters. So far I've got 5 (godzilla, ghidrah, mothra, rodan and gamera), plenty for my purposes.
If your environment is divided between dedicated servers and client-only hosts, consider implementing a different theme for each, so you can readily tell by name which class of host it is.
---------------------
---------------------
John 3:16 - God's Public License
My friend has named his after actions - bounce, crash, fall. (Though I wouldn't want to name an NT box crash)
Mine are koi, fishtank, and pond.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
we use old hurricane names at work: carmen, camille, audrey, hugo, betsy etc.
before I came here it was shit like "fs2nola" and "blah_incorporated"
I have trouble coming up with names for all the workstations, though. Around here almost no body names their servers anything interesting. They think I am really weird.
At home:
trotsky, infidel, liberacion, che (that wouldn't go over too well at work)
support gun control: take guns from cops
And it makes sense. I've never had a machine work after tinkering with it if it didn't suck blood. I've always blamed this on the sheet metal gods being offended, but alas, I see this is not the case.
While I was working on my master's, there were generally interesting naming schemes. The Suns in "The Zoo" were all named after animals (and configuration management was accomplished by types of animals, e.g., "All the fish will be down Tuesday to upgrade to Solaris 2.6"). The SGIs in "The Louvre" were all named after artists. There was a network with all the machines named after MASH characters, and one named after Greek mythological characters. The network used for genetic algorithms research was named after genetics terms (Codon, Allele, etc; Creation was the exception to the naming scheme, but it still fit). The Beowulf cluster I built used a less imaginative naming scheme to keep configuration easy (ABC01, ABC02, ABC03,...). The "behind the scenes" servers were all named after airplanes (sabre.xxx, mustang.xxx, etc), until someone decided to use less interesting but more suitable names (library.xxx, mail.xxx, etc). ... I got a dirty look when I replaced the Sun "Allante" with a Linux box and named it "Gremlin". The MS boxen are named according to the primary user, followed by the Windows version. For example, I started with "Bohnca95". Now that I've replaced it with an NT box, I find it amusing that my MS machine is named "Bohncant".
My machines at home are named after SF authors (Asimov, Heinlein, etc)
I have to machines on my desk at work now. The Unix systems are all named after luxery automobiles
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
I'm so pleased you enjoyed it. The phrase "non-compliant" hadn't ever occurred to me... but I like it. :-)
(And I was _so_ hoping someone _else_ would mention it, so I didn't have to look self-important.)
Cheers,
Wasn't it Loki who was in The Mask (in the movie)? My router is called `themask' because it does, well... masquerading :-)
/* Steinar */
(This comment is of course GPLed.)
I used to work at a military site where the servers were named after planets, then we went to greek gods.. as the one most familiar with mythology, I would get consulted with questions like "What's a good name for an exchange server? we've already used mercury"
One of my favorites was one that was supposed to be a resume database.. We named it 'akasha' after the hindu akashic records.
Restrictions are prohibited. Be well, get better.
The department where I used to work used gods (primarily Greek and Roman) but then had a few B-5 characters thrown in. The engineering college were I went to school used to have an interesting scheme based on a naval theme: the large log-in servers were named after battleships, and everything smaller was named after smaller ship classes (cruisers, destroyers, etc equated to application servers, workstations, etc). Network printers were named after missiles (Like tomahawk, shrike, harpoon).
Where I work now, we have a boring scheme based partially on location, type of server, and a few other attributes.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Creative naming schemes are fun when your environment is small. They don't scale though.
For situations like this you tend to have lots of machines that are pretty much identical aside from the hostname. These machines can usefully be named "foo0000" or whatever.
The more distinct names tend to be useful mainly when the machines are fairly unique and can be easily distinguished.
There's a 'park.*' subdomain in (of all places) Park hall at the local university. Here are some of their hostnames:
central.park
double.park
ball.park
comiskey.park
parallel.park
We also have a 'train' domain where the main server is called 'soul.'
That's why when I started my own company I settled on a a naming scheme you'd have to love. Our first server (which handles everything of course) is Tiamat, mother of the gods. The Developement Box is Bahamut, who carries the world (and an elephant) on it's shoulders. And the Marketing box is Loki, god of mischief.
I'm sure we'll settle on a more stable naming convention once we get some more servers, but even then we'll use the names to help personalize and identify the servers.
God knows I'll never let a lame named server in *MY* company!
Dave 'Relkin' Stansel
CEO / Owner
Odysseys Network, Inc
we have cow, llama, walrus, donkey, hippo... the machines arent big and/or slow or anything, we just like those particular animals...
moooo
--Siva
Keyboard not found.
Keyboard not found.
Press F1 to continue.
When I was at FTP Software, back before the suits took over, routers were named for toxic waste (methy-ethyl-ketone etc.), servers were lubricants (wd40, babyoil, ky, vaxeline(!)), and printers were fabrics (wool, leather, lycra).
My next company used towns in Massachusetts, mostly North Shore since that's where they were located: topsfield, danvers, boxford etc. So I named one "enfield", that being one of the towns in central MA that was drowned by the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir in the 1930s.
I've usually given my personal workstations names from favorite sf novels; usually "anarres", from LeGuin's The Dispossessed, and "chanur", from the CJ Cherryh series of the same name. My home machine has always been named "servetus", after the 16th-century religious reformer, and I was going to use a religious-reformer theme for future machines (pelagius, socinius, priestley), but the only addition thus far has been a work machine I took home and named "eruditorum" (from Stephenson's Cryptonomicon), sort-of combining the home and work themes.
Some friends have a "generic" theme for their house network, so the main server is "server", the Windows laptop is "laptop", etc. This kinda falls down in scalability terms, though.
--
My server is named spicerack, and the other nodes on my net are basil, oregano, pepper and tarragon (and soon garlic, thyme, and cinnamon, as soon as I get an additional outlet wired in down in the basement...)
OTOH, the computer where I work is MDSC0700512...
Just junk food for thought...
We use college sports teams here for engineering servers - aztec, wildcat, triton, etc. I am starting to name our GIS servers after muppet characters. I considered using LoTR names, but that seems a bit worn out. Just pick a large group of related names, and go for it! Tell the PHB's that you will use the corp name scheme, but just use those as aliases to the "real" names.
Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
When a friend got three new linux systems, I suggested he name them Stop, Drop, and Roll :)
Brazil. (Easy search engine fodder!) Now if I could just figure out what that first set of names is from. Blair Witch Project! (Only that would be Captain!) :)
Hubble
Bubble
Toil
Trouble
But the boring ones like "Mail", "Sequent", "Caldera", "Firewall" stuck.
The boss isn't *against* 'fun' names for the servers; it's just, well, its a hassle having to remember which name means what :-)
- doctea
When discussing things with my friends we find it difficult not to start going "Phil-iiiip", "Lili-uuhhn" and "Angel-ick-ah" in That Voice. :-)
Next time I redo my network I'll be using Prime.autobot.tf, HotRod.autobot.tf, and BumbleBee.autobot.tf, tho :)
- doctea
OWO (Origin Worlds Online) the group of Origin who makes games like UO (Ultima Online) actually uses most of these... Just try various virtue.owo.com hosts. :)
:)
Someone made a list of a big number of what they had there once and it was quite amusing to read.
At Northwestern University, the systems in the main computer science lab are named after Godzilla and various related characters (like mothra, etc). However, at some point last year, I believe we were sent a cease and desist type letter from company that owns godzilla asking us to change the name of our servers.
:)
Nothing came of it as I recall, and godzilla.cs.nwu.edu [129.105.99.240] still exists.
Still, it's interesting to see what some companies will do.
AR Schleicher
ars@iag.net
Korolev. ;)
In the Image Synthesis Group, we name all out machines after painters. So my box is Giotto, and there's also vangogh, rembrandt, miro, moreau, bacon, chagall, davinci, donatello, munch, magritte, monet, raphael, rodin and yeats.
Leo
--
I've got green eyes, red hair, and I'm left handed. A hundred years ago, I'd have been considered in league with the De
The domain at my house has a "Real Genius" theme.
Laslo - The oldest and most powerful Box
Mitch - My little laptop
Chris - My GF's workstation
Jordan - My workstation
Kent - Turned off
Jerry - Turned off
--fatboy
This is not a strong area of ext2, to say the least.
*eye*
You're making a joke, right?
*pace*
*eye*
You must be making a joke.
That's like saying that cars these days have gotten quite good at protecting their drivers from fatal crashes. The statement may be true, but that sort of thing should still NEVER happen. It is to be avoided at almost all costs.
I'm no linux apologist; I agree that ext2 needs to be replaced with a jfs. However, linux, as with most unix-like OSs, doesn't randomly reboot unless the hardware's flaky or the system is not using a stable series of software.
I'm not saying that windows isn't stable. I'm not saying that it is. I'm just saying that your argument is one of the dumbest I've encountered in a while.
--
A host is a host from coast to coast...
A host is a host from coast to coast...
Unless it's down, or slow, or fails to POST!
Well, Brazil.. obviously..
--Dave
Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology
You can't beat the name "Lucy" for a laptop!
My only problem is what to name my second Linux
box after the first was named "Pengy"
All of our servers are named after celestial bodies or constellations. We have a server with a big disk array named hydra. There is a shell server named pandora. The only exception is the old frontpage server, it is an NT server named sphincter. If forced to bring up an exchange server, I think it should be named siphilis.
...Linux!
Andrew N.
--
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
So far I've used
Since my local domain is "sdtzone", the 's'es fit rather nicely :). Plus the names actually say something about the nature of the computers.
Heh the article reminds me of this MIT hack, where students renamed the Athena workstations after chemical elements :).
burn
day
spot
and my favorite....fire
and many more
Also my personal machine is called nuclear which just has a cool ring to it. It's also much better then lilac, which is what it used to be called.
We once named a whole lab full of machines after weather phenomena, with the servers getting names like tornado and typhoon, and the workstations getting 'smaller' names like breeze and gust...
And, of course, I named my machine "dervish".
Having read the RFC and got fed up with all our office machines being given names based on the initials of their owners, and then being swapped about blah blah until nobody knew who they were any more, I suggested naming them using a theme that didn't include names. The management asked for suggestions. Several good themes were put forward by various members of staff. The usual cars, cartoon characters, etc. However, the management decided on 'biblical names'...
;-) and 'Creation', which is about the only name for the strangely assembled pile of components that always seems to be missing something or other (a case for a start).
Luckily, presumably for them, we also own the hotel up the road, and that bloke called Gideon is always leaving copies of his book there... Off went the M.D. to find a copy and get a load of biblical names, which I as sys.admin get to allocate 'in the order on the list' (he said). What he didn't say was in what order I should visit people to give out their names. Applications engineering got 'job' and 'lot', and several other not-so-humourus names were handed out.
Not being a particularly religious person myself, after a while I ran out of names. Hence our new, rather less officially sanctioned hostname theme, introduced by myself in the interests of religious equality. We now have, amongst the various disciples, romans and countrymen, the names 'Vishnu', 'Hezbollah', 'Ayatollah', 'Oestre' (go figure that one out), 'Zoroastra', 'Allah', and 'Siddhattha'. My own machines are 'Index' (that one came from the bible
I'm always on the look out for more ways to buck the trend that 'them upstairs' seek to push onto me. Suggestions?
I have used planets from the Foundation series on my home network: terminus, trantor, korell, tazenda, kalgan, santanni and siwenna. So far.
I know. I have an account on inferno remember? I used your zone files to learn BIND mack in the day. :)
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
I to am a Systems Administrator, for a fairly large company, and, in the begining i had some fun with naming. All my linux boxes had names from the simpsons: Homer, lisa, bart, millhouse... etc. And when we started getting Sun machines, we named them after HHGG (hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy) characters: zaphod, prefect (in fact our 3 e5500 servers are named Prefect-01 - Prefect-03), Trillian, and agrajag.
Then the same thing happened to me, the naming convetion got changed by a P.H.B. to the military call letters: Alpha(which was left out, cause our Alpha was already named Alpha)Bravo, Charly, Delta... blah, blah. And now i have machines called oscar, and papa *shudder*.
To make matters worse the naming convention has changed AGAIN to wb-ct-qa-qfe02. unbeleivable.
I've been using Greek gods. I figure if I ever run out I'll move to Roman. If I get to the point that I'm running out of names, I'll need another admin in here :)
~Sentry21~
Mmmm well I use reddwarf for all some of my boxes
holly, lister, kryten
Then there are a couple from the wonderful
on line comic goats:
neil and bob
and finally my router is very unimaginatively called
'router' oh well..
At work we have:
dogbert
odie
gromit
scooby
scrappy
goober
and muttley
Maybe if we get some more we'll start with perdita and pongo from 101 Dalmations. My co-worker who came up with these names has a Gromit back pack (a cutesy little thing with a *tiny* storage space and thus of limited utility) which we left sitting in the server room on top of the appropriate server for people to see through the window. To my disappointment, nobody commented on it...
We're using characters from The Dukes of Hazzard. We've got:
Boss_Hogg (SQL SERVER)
Daisy
Cletus
Cooter
Roscoe (Exchange server)
GoodOlBoys (Linux mail workhorse)
and probably one or 2 I havent remembered....
My personal computer is called TOTORO after the character in Hayao Miyazaki cartoon "My Neighbor Totoro"
More info about the film is at http://www.nausicaa.net/miyazaki/totoro/
a book on how to do it.
this should be a book.
We have all of our machines named after jazz greats: coltrane, miles, thelonious, billie, vince, and so on. We'll never run out of names. :)
-Andrei
-Andrei
oh the horror....almost 800 comments! oh well, no time to read them all, but i'll put my naming scheme in anyway.
i use names of cities that Alexander the Great tromped through. Tyre, Illium, Issus, that sort of thing. Something like this might actually be alright for your 'professional' bastards.
"The things we wizards have to put up with."--Jethro Bodine
I have a perverse need to give my machines arcane names that are hard to type:
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
Currently I have "cthulhu" at home (a good name, I think) and "cthulhu2" for the laptop (a boring name). Inspired by the discussion here, I think I'll rename them ni and noo. If I ever get any more, I can move on to shrubber, swallow, herring, etc.
My
For me it varies between the domain you use too reference the machines..
:)
One domain is world locations, of various types,
such as cyprus, marakesh, etc...
One is (somewhat)little known places in Disney theme parks, such as reedycreek, club33, etc..
And the last of current domains is things that make sense coming out of Mulan, mainly dealing with Mushu.
Yes I am a Disney fan, go fig
I think for my next domain I'll do historic battles...
I have a feeling this is one of the better ways to do it, but doing it by machine type would be much easier in that case. (of course, this is NT so removing/adding it from/to the domain takes a little time, especially on the slower machines)
Blah, at home I use Pokemon characters that fit the machine...
Gyardos (Rather powerful blue pokemon) for my SGI Indy (also blue) ... goes with my name) for my NT machine
Onix (just neat pokemon
eevee for my brothers machine (his favorite character... hehe)
Hey when there are over 150 characters you could use those pretty well.
--onyx--
Of course we cant forget the one that started it all, the biggest, the baddest.
Go figure.
Totoro - my new work desktop
Catbus - my work laptop
Golem - my server at work that was built from spare parts
Phoenix - The linux machine that was reborn/rebuilt after the hard drive crashed, and had to be replaced.
Angus - the encient 486 HP Netserver, bigger than any two other computers at home.
DingBang - home desktop
Is a "System Engineer" referred to here on /. really an engineer? In my world (aerospace industry), a Systems Engineer, combines a variety of engineering dicsiplines (electrical, mechanical, aerospace, software, etc) and oversees these subsystems to put together a product that satisfies the customer's requirements. This is a prestigous and difficult job.
I think administering networks can also be difficult, but wouldn't the job title be Network Administrator? You would never find a "Systems Engineer" administering a network at my company.
Incidentally, computer names I use for my several computers are rocket scientists:
goddard
oberth
I'm currently looking for a famous Russian rocket scientist for a third.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
I like to pick off-the-wall name schemes that result in individual names that aren't neccesarily that odd.
The name scheme I use for my domain (aisb.org) is "characters from fiction who were false gods within that fiction".
My main web server is "Zardoz" (from the Sean Connery movie of the same name; in the movie, a false god chose it as a name in reference to the "wiZARD of OZ").
I have a machine at home that dual-boots between Linux and NT, and has a different address based on what it's running (so my other systems don't look for services that aren't there when it's lobotomized). It alternates between "Valen" (Linux) and "Sinclair" (NT).
I have a laptop, and it's really light, so I named it after the false Budda from Zelazny's "Lord of Light". It's Mahasamatman, or "sam" for short.
I once set up Linux on an SE/30 to work as a router. I named it "Legba" -- not after the real Legba, but after the AI from the Gibson cyberpunk novels.
At the office, our naming scheme is "people who died rich and insane". We're very flexible about this. For example, after Steve Jobs killed the NeXT machine, the Newton, and Mac clones, we decided "he's dead to us", so our NeXT print server was named "steve". Our SPARC is named Tesla (he liked to throw sparks), our main print server is named Theresa (Mother Theresa was certainly rich in life experience, at least, and seemed to live to serve others)...
Sacrifice
...
Honor
Honesty
Compassion
Justice
Humility
Spirituality
Valor
These can be expanded to include the equivalent vices:
Greed - (Sacrifice)
Shame - (Honor)
Deceit - (Honesty)
Vengeance - (Compassion)
Iniquity - (Justice)
Hubris - (Humility)
Carnality - (Spirituality)
Cowardice - (Valor)
Enjoy
My favorite naming convention was cigarette brands.
marlboro
true
merit
benson
hedges
winston
salem
capri
camel
newport
basic
gpc
maverick
I name my computers after Disney characters -- the Unix machines traditionally get named after heroines, and the Windows machines after heros.
But that doesn't mean I can't use this naming scheme to describe the functions of the machine at the same time.
Here's a list of names and their explanations:
belle - the machine with the prettiest screen
duchess - the server machine
mulan - the firewall
bianca - the offsite Unix box
bernard - the offsite windows box
toulouse, berloiz, marie - workstations
jasmine - the machine that never can stay up (it always goes down)
esmerelda - the machine with two large removable disks stacked on top
Yes, the last two are pretty bad. But I know exactly which machines they all are, and most anyone who comes over can guess more than half the names.
Jack.
(why yes, I do have a big electric bill -- why do you ask?)
Well at work we have boring music names like RHAPSODY, ALLEGRO, SONATA, etc...
At home it's DEATHSTAR, ENDOR, HOTH, etc...
Last place I worked:
CATBERT, DOGBERT, ELBONIA, DILBERT, etc...
Hunter
if (nt == unstable) { switchTo.linux() }
RateVegas.com - Vegas Reviews
Actually RFC1178 has actual information/guidelines, RFC2100 is merely an amusing poem.
:)
Maybe YOU need to read both before you start spouting off
Both are good to read.
--
Delphis
He was always naming its robots with a surname even if the production name of hte robot was quite stern.
It is normal for "management" types (And I use that term loosely... many younger managers and managers lately dont have a hive of bugs in their butt, or the lack of brain power to function as a human... I'm lucky in the point that all management at my office are the best humanity could ever provide!) cant grasp the concept of networking let alone giving a server a name that is easy to remember/easy to use/and isn't a brain-dead assenine idea...
... management dont know your job, or how to do it.... that's why they hired you!
The LNXDHCPSVR434 idea (and I've heard that stupid idea before) should be confronted for what it is worth.. you reply to the person, "Gawd man, that's the dumbest idea I have ever heard!" if they persist please offer them the list of names you have for their servers! ( HLP^Dsk54_DNS34-Bkp9_SP3 for example!) If your company doesnt have that level of communication that you cant tell a superior that an idea sounds dumb then get out of there fast as they only want yes men.. ("do you have that SQL done yet? I asked for it an hour ago... yes sir right away sir!" instead of "We will be lucky to get it up and running in 2 weeks.. the vendor sent an update that broke the NT client side and they wont admit to the error so we have to fix it ourselves!! Who ordered the upgrade anyways? why didnt they specify a test period?")
remember
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I have begun to find out that there are two kinds of people in the IT field. There are those people who seek to be an extreme, and those who seek balance. Those who are extremists usually have a rally cry of `Security!' or `Cost savings!' Totally wrapt in their own technical crusade, they lose sight of the fact that to us doing work, these machines are people too. As a sysadmin I gave up bickering over how much I got payed and what tool I should use to track pr0n usage and took up ethical issues like this one. I have to say I feel better about being a Linux bigot. ;)
Bad Mojo
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Would the Mathematica lab happen to be near the 6-pack? :)
Not sure who pulled these, but they were posted on the nettime list sometime last year.
s -again.ai.mit.edu d -length-buffers.mit.edu
A Classic - rtfm.mit.edu
Cereals - normal, at first.
life.ai.mit.edu
trix.ai.mit.edu
alpha-bits.ai.mit.edu
beet-chex.ai.mit.edu
masticated-neo-bohemian-cthuloid.mit.edu
chewy-chomp.mit.edu
General Abuse
my-hostname-is-longer-than-yours.mit.edu
no-sir-i-did-not-see-you-playing-with-your-doll
long-hostname-carefully-selected-to-expose-fixe
Commentary and Other Odd Things
emacs-makes-a-computer-slow.mit.edu (notably not in gnu.ai.mit.edu domain)
existence-is-meaningless.mit.edu
failure-is-unacceptable.mit.edu
i-cant-think-of-a-new-hostname.mit.edu
i-dont-know.mit.edu
i-m-so-tired.mit.edu
i-see-everything-twice.mit.edu
ignorance-is-strength.mit.edu
incite-sedition.mit.edu
its-a-feature.mit.edu
lost-cause.mit.edu
my-hovercraft-is-full-of-eels.mit.edu
my-dog-ate-it.mit.edu
not-a-guppy.mit.edu
not-a-mac.mit.edu
not-a-minihub.mit.edu
not-a-pretty-computer.mit.edu
not-a-printer.mit.edu
not-a-supported-platform.mit.edu
not-a-typewriter.mit.edu
not-an-sgi.mit.edu
not-what-you-think.mit.edu
glad-i-am-not-a-dec.mit.edu
pepsi-sux.mit.edu
piece-of-shit.mit.edu
point-and-drool.mit.edu
thing-that-should-not-be.mit.edu
think-different.mit.edu
turning-coffee-into-theorems.mit.edu
yes-dear.mit.edu
small-dogs.mit.edu
small-gods.mit.edu
the-brown-ring-of-quality.mit.edu
Technical
bovine-spongiform-encephalopathy.mit.edu
tep-soda-machine.mit.edu
turing-machine.mit.edu
I use world cities.
The individual user systems are named after the user's hometown, although, for me personally Drammen was too long, so I used Oslo (hey, it's in the neighbourhood). Servers are given big metropolitan hubs like NewYork, London, Paris, Berlin, Bombay.
Je ne parle pas francais.
I work with a very large client here are some of the name groups they use. Blue Battleship Cyan Clue Green Family Feud Indio Jepordy Lavendar Life etc Our machines are a hodge podge: NaCl, Paprika, Manx, Lynx, Sphynx, gypsyrose, hal, odyssey, Poser, Dubdub, Rubba, Zither, Slither, Stony. Many of our machines are installed as pairs - either primary and backup or 2 seprate tasks thus they seem to have 'mates'. I would be terribly unhappy if we had to name our machines like one part of our clients do: PBNYMAIL01 *barf*
Well I have Wallace Blue, my perky little 486 internet gateway, and then there's Warton and Emma the unfortunate PC's we beat on day in and day out.
ada - My IA32 Linux box
ash - My 21164 Alpha
foo - My Win98 box
pocket - My Palm IIIx
- WB Characters (Bugs-bunny, taz, pinky, the-brain, plucky, aunt-slappy [the as/400], yakko, wakko, dot, daffy, otto-von-schnitzelpuskrankengescheitmeier, roadrunner, wile-e-coyote)
- Characters from The Matrix (Neo, Trinity, Morpheus)
- Characters from Tron (Tron, Ram, Flynn, Alan-1, Recognizer)
- Characters from The Tick (Tick, Arthur, Die-Fledermaus, American-Maid, Sewer-Urchin, Carmelita, Speak, Barry, Mucilage-man, Chairface-Chippendale, etc.)
- Of course, obUserFriendlyReference, Erwin, our other AS/400 (poor guy keeps getting put into all kinds of weirdass systems
:) - South Park (stan, cartman, kyle, and kenny are too obvious... We went with pip, damian, tweek, officer-barbrady, mr-garrison...)
There're always the classic Athena naming schemes... Off the top of my head, I can think of some.- Greek/Roman mythology (Athena, Hercules, Epimetheus, Atlas, and countless others. Use this one if you're gonna have a lot of servers.
- Ringworld (ringworld, louis-wu, speaker-to-animals, teela-brown, hindmost, longshot)
- Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Beeblebrox, etc.)
You get the idea. Find your favorite mass-media thing (be it Xena or Major League Baseball) and steal steal steal!echo Prpv a\'rfg cnf har cvcr | tr Pacfghnrvp Cnpstuaeic
i named all my homes machines stuff like exocet, hellfire, patriot, and sidewinder.. then i ran out of cool missile names so i started naming them ambda (courtesy of half-life) and cessna (yeah, the plane).
For our servers at school we use a little bit more logical names. i am a network administrator for the Center for Advanced Technologies (CAT) so all our servers are named after cats, such as PUMA520 (IBM PC Server 520 running novell), COUGAR320 (IBM PC Server 320, novell), ICAT (NT webserver), and MEDIA_SWAP (not named after a cat but its just a crappy little server used for *gasp* swapping media!), then we have intellistation named PantherNT, and a crappy little 98 box named Tabbycat.. oh yeah, also the linux box is named 'nulynx', and i almost forgot the netfinity 5500 terminal server, named Simba-TS after the lion king i think
I just have fun with the machines I've got.
cyrix 200: hagetaka (vulture) with win95, big bird with linux.
K6-2/450: hisuitaka (jade falcon) win95, asuka with linux.
P2/500: turkina (battletech people will understand), regardless of OS.
generally, I give systems names of
anime characters, mechs, or items related to them.
(avoiding the obvious MAGI names, and AI's from fiction).
place I work at is less imaginative,
they just tack a number on the end of the company name.
gotta GUESS what does what. *BZZ!* sorry, try again.
We came across this problem when we were forced to rebuild our infrastructure. What we wanted was something that didn't limit the number of servers we could have, was abstract enough to allow a server to do multiple things if required, but specific enough to give an impression of it.
We decided to use colors (red, orange, blue, etc)... The firewall became known as RED, our webserver was GREEN, etc. These were the primary names, but with some DNS aliasing, you could let the users think they were talking to whatever you want. And with the NUMBER of colors out there (if you need more, talk to Crayola), you weren't limited in the number of servers you could install on the network.
Coincidentally, the test Win2K box was known as BLACK...;o)
Here at RPI, all the IPs in the DHCP system are dished out with Pokemon aliases, I believe.
Here's some I just pulled from people on my ICQ list:
farfetchd-26.dynamic.rpi.edu
goldbat-17.dynamic.rpi.edu
machop-04.dynamic.rpi.edu
squirtle-22.dynamic.rpi.edu
As far as my own equipment, I originally named everything with greek letters. Main machine was "omega", laptop was "epsilon", etc.
But now I've begun to change. Partly because the greek letters aren't original enough, partly because greek_letter-->frat.
Now I use subatomic particles for naming. My desktop is still "omega", but my server is "photon" and my new laptop is "electron".
At home I personally use gods from all different mythologies. Orion, Aries, Apollo, Ra, Sekhmet, Prometheus, ect ect.
_ _____________________
At my office they started out using Disney names to the primary systems. Mickey, Minnie, Aladdin, Goofy, Pluto, Jafar. I work in the Technology Center for a large school district in Texas. The funnies thing we did was name the cafeteria system Alpo.
A personal victory for me was when I got to name our new Microsoft Proxy and Exchange Servers. I know....they suck, so don't flame me. Not my decision. I only do what I'm told. Anyway...since they are huge ugly beasts that will turn on you in a moments notice.....I named them Jeckyl and Hyde.
This routine borders on black magic. Touch it at your own peril.
_______________________________________________
"The code I write borders on black magic. Modify it at your own peril."
My naming convention is based on African animals. Zebra, Springbok, Mongoose, Hippo, Lion, etc...
The names are usually fitting.. Lion being my overly powerful workstation.
I have connected to machines with names based on numbers and networks seperating each machine type with a different subnet and naming system.
When it comes down to it, a user has a better time dealing with their server if they have a name for it. In many cases you need to know the name of your box in order to do various tasks. In my case, all my users need to know the name of their machine in order to access their pages via SSL.
Show me a user that will think thehulk is unprofessional.
- Hugh Buchanan
- Userfriendly.com
Here at eregion.de (but internal network, 192.168.x.y), I have:
- gandalf (does everything, samba emulated PDC, print server, dhcp, nfs, nis, dns, mail, news, uucp, fax, dialin, users homedirs, mirroring of stuff, httpd, & & &)
- aragorn (will takeover gandalf's job soon, as gandalf will become apache only)
- gate (masquerading FW, maybe i'll rename it to hama or cerebrimbor)
workstations are schleppi, little and bigone
For our embryonic network at home, we're using the names of plants in the nightshade family. (Atropine, a heart stimulant, is the chemical that makes deadly nightshade, a.k.a. belladona, deadly.) My wife's computer is "eggplant" and mine is "petunia"; when I get a certain 486 box up and running as a firewall, I'll call it "nettle". For future expansion, we have "belladona", "henbane", "potato", "tomato", "tobacco"....
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
On another note, when I've set up networks, my naming conventions differ. I've used projects in the space program (gemini, voyager, mercury, etc.), code-names of planes (blackbird, thunderdart), and one kick I'm on lately is characters from mine and other SA's favourite Anime. Its interesting, and most places sounds quite intelligent (Hey, the second ethernet card is down in Shinji! Did the angels take him out finally?). So, hope these help a bit.
If it comes from man, it will fail.
If it comes from god, It will succeed.
Detachment 3 Media
Exposed, Exploited, Exploded
Structured names on a WAN are a GREAT IDEA!
My company uses this formula:
area code + department use + type + unique number
So we have servers named:
610ISDNT001
215MKTNV001
215ISDSB001
Works out pretty well!
-Fritz
For my network, I use the planets. Kinda lame and already done, but it makes sense. The firewall/computer seen by the world is sun since everything inside my network must revolve around it. My personal computer is mercury just 'cause. Wife's computer is Venus. Our NeXT is Saturn. Earth is a Macintosh not hooked up currently, and my laptop is Luna - Spanish for moon, since the laptop can be a satellite. I was going to go a little more in depth and make the laptop a name of a Saturn moon or some such thing, but I didn't want to get too obscure.
Just for the real curious, here is my schools (Mich. State. U.) Computer Science Department's workstation/server Name List
www.jackasscritics.com
How about names of cities throughout the world? This makes it easy to ID the important machines (capitals) and can also give an idea of geographical location. It's not the most inspired convention, but it's an idea - and will probably keep the PHB's mouth shut.
At part of Xerox I worked at, they used an NIS domain of "swamp", so all the machines had names of things you find in swamps - my machine was "mangrove", and we had others like "bubbles", "egret", and so on. A friend of mine tried to convince the sysadmin to let him use "hoffa", but the sysadmin didn't go for it.
The naming convention for the plethora network is "terms of venery" (see _An Exaltation of Larks_). Of course, most things don't have well-defined ones, so we've fallen back on "name for a group of x". So, the digi server is called "hand", the gateway is called "corridor", the user machine is called "herd". They get sillier. "puddle" runs muds. My machine is "guild". The first Sun of any sort we got in (an IPC) is called "galaxy". For a while, I had my amigas in a subdomain "harem".
All the macs have Anime names, so they're in the "cel" subdomain. The G3 is "ryoga", because it's strong, powerful, and not very bright. The SoftWindows PC that runs on it is called "pchan".
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
I've received kudos a few times for the naming convention we have here at my house. Everyone picks their favorite classic arcade game, and the servers are mspacman and pacman (mspacman, of course being the faster of the two).
Its a great naming convention because there are plenty of names to choose from.
So far we have:
mspacman
pacman
tempest (my box)
galaxian
galaga
zaxxon
frogger
So, you took simple, easy to type SHORT names that were references to the pre-christian celtic epic The Battle of the Trees and switched to longer-to-type meaningless names because you got tired of things making sense? Whatever floats your boat, I guess.... Hey, why don't you name one antidisestablishmentarianism - after all, it's the same number of mouse clicks to select it on your Microsoft box, and those whiny WAN and LAN administrators need some more carpal tunnel punishment!
--Charlie
I've always enjoyed this gamed as well.
Where I work now I can log into:
achilles
bismarck
tirpitz
airbus
murphy
pompei
jerico
mir
mururoa
All named after famous disasters and crashes.
There used to be a "titanic" but I guess that must have gone down.
Sorry.
"Trouble is, just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's true"
"Trouble is, just because it's obvious doesn't mean it's true"
--Terry Pratchett
Sound like they should be named after Dilbert chanracters at your place.......
......
Seriously, though, at the place I work, the boss has a sailboat which he hopes to sail around the world one day in. So, the servers are named for all the places he wants to visit:
Fiji, Samoa,
GRH
The last place I worked at they used European capital names like:
Rome
Paris
Amsterdam
stuff like that, you can always going from there to local names or something.
Sounds kewl though: 'I'm gonna go see Paris now'.
Not all bad, but not quiet as sweet as cartoon character names.
New things are always on the horizon
My server/workstation (soon to be completely the former, as soon as I can afford another box) is named aether. My NeXT is named monolith (it's a station, and thus a black slab). If I manage to obtain a SPARC, I'll be naming it sol, and my badly needed workstation will also need a name. Suggestions?
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
On the contrary. If you need to force host names to understand which machines are which you are in for trouble somewhere down the road: when you are forced to change from an HP/UX box to a Sun Box for whatever reason for a major service and now all your clients expect HPUX239435 to be that server, which is now a Sun: so do you change all the clients or have a Sun named HPUX239435? Oops.
You need additional information independent of the hostname (ESPECIALLY for bigger networks). DNS tables, LDAP, your own proprietary information, etc., but don't key functionality/architecture on hostname in a big network or you'll be out of a job because of it.
"Cause there's 40 different shades of black, so many fortresses and ways to attack, so why you complainin'?"
The department I work for uses the names of computers found in movies, and books for the Netware servers. Preferably evil ones and obscure, HAL would be real boring. I don't read anything by O'reilly so I'm of little use. ... emphasis on blunt force trauma. fistofrage coming soon.
I prefer to use weapons for Linux servers at work. morningstar, rapier, claymore
my home consists of fuedal themes, with some odd ones for roommates. darklord - main workstation, darkknight - firewall/masq server, jester(darkdaze) - NT server, quake - offtheme, but necessary, my roommates have stupid computer names. So I recommend,
weapons, predatory animals, just remember OWLS not hooters
Computer naming is truly an art.
:-)
I have a Dell Optiplex 133 that I use as my main machine. (Normally this would be way too slow for this day in age, but not with linux...but that's another story.) It's named "farmer". (as in, in the dell) The really sick thing is, I'm pround of this name.
As for group names, the best I've come up with are Statler, Waldorf, Gonzo, Piggy, Sam...Tons of names to choose from and you get to call them "The Muppet Machines."
Fugu - openbsd server/router. this one was obvious once i picked the sushi convention. openbsd == security -> blowfish encryption. Fugu is that ultra poisonous, kill you before you swallow it if it's prepared wrong sushi. oh heck, just go watch that simpsons episode.
Unagi - bbq eel. my super mac workstation. unagi == yum, mac == yum. therefore unagi == mac. heh.
tako - i let my roommate choose his own name (from the convention of course), and being that he's a freak and has never had sushi, he picked tako. not that tuna is bad, but there's just so many better names and nigiri to choose from and eat.
Hamachi is up next... whenever i raise enough money for another machine.
I use the names of the characters of douglas adams book "hitchhikers guide to the galaxy". ArthurDent is my machine, arthur as an alias. marvin (the robot) as my firewall, HeartOfGold for my Winsomething machine - with improbabilty field propulsion - same as the well know os - the probability to get a gpf is high...
Use you imagination ! IF there is something like (book, movie, etc.), it might be a motivation to use and administer a machine. And the users are pleased with it because they can remeber the names
. Just imagine : FS-SINLPA-3 ? Yes a file server... what about Singapour3 ? it's a file server in Singapour, 3rd of the line...
Support can then be much easier.
Have fun and happy users
At work we've got about 60 machines named after Scottish rivers... However I always laugh when I hear about the seismic boat that had it's machines named after serial killers. Quality.
In my house we have (really) 25 computers, 10 of which are connected to the network directly. My roommate (who started the network before I moved in) was naming his after items in the solar system, with Linux machines named after moons of Jupiter. We got to the point where are computers are named after objects in the solar system, with their names having the second function of describing them. Io is the router (Hopefully you can figure out why.) My main computer is Charon (I've always used that as an online name, and it's a moon of Pluto, so it seemed appropriate) with my secondary computer (sitting on top of Charon) being Pluto, appropriately enough. Saturn is the main graphical workstation, with Jupiter being the server with the big HD for mp3s. The notebooks are named after comets, and the Macintoshes after asteroids.
I even have my work machine IP-tunelling in as acentauri. (Any extras would be bcentauri, gcentauri, dcentauri, etc...)
For the printers, we took a slightly different tack. They were originally named after the ghosts from Pacman (Inky was the inkjet, Blinky the Laser printer that had a permanently blinking LED, Dot for the dot-matrix...) but when we got the second inkjet, we had to branch out to similar sounding names. (We thought of painting the new printer pink so it could be named Pinky, but decided against it.) Yes, I know Dot isn't a Pacman ghost, but I didn't remember the fourth ghost's name... (It's Clyde.)
Another non-functioning site was "uncertainty.microsoft.com."
The purpose of that site was not known.
lowry, tuttle, buttle, layton, lint
I love it. Users will of course confuse Tuttle and Buttle... Oh, the irony.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
I knew I wouldn't be the only one.
My 4 main machines at home are Destiny, Despair, Desire and Delirium.
I just can't bring myself to name one Death... Seems somewhat heretical to me.
/* The beatings will continue until morale improves. */
Check out the Index of Famous Dog names. "Welcome to Dog Central! The title says it all; this is an Index of Famous Dogs throughout history, both in reality and in fiction. This is not to be considered a complete list, nor can I account for the accuracy of all the information here (just some of it)."
Cats and other critters also available on that site.
(Back in 1982, we needed to move our systems from one building to another. We were told to lose the Star Trek themed names. We picked state names; useful since all of them have two letter abbreviations. "lznv" was the "Nevada" system in the Lincroft building (location code "lz"; dunno what the "z" stood for). It was funny, though, tracing the bus from Hawaii to New Hampshire.-)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Computer names @ purdue are seemingly random. Expert is the main Sun box, Others are lore, postoffice (wonder what that one is) oasis, etc.
;)
Purdue North Central otoh, has names by precious gemstones, sapphire, ruby, etc. These are pretty cool..
At work, our names are descriptive of the machine's location and function. This is set by a standard naming scheme set forth by the powers that be. Val1A01 tells me what location, and what type of server
On my personal network, i'm kinda random. herbert, spaceball1 (my main machine), hellifiknow... named my friend's screwdriver because were couldn't think of a name, and there was a screwdriver (tool, not beverage) on the desk next to it.
As if anyone really cares
-Dan
.heeses. That's what we call our stuff (We like cheese). We found that some cheeses are too long (parmesan, mozzarella), so we're now looking at short cheeses, ending up with tupi, lappi, brin and bra. You can tell a lot about a person by their choice of cheese. Easier to type you see.
Odd balls go for things like slice and burger, partriots redleicester, cheshire etc all.
And if you can't think of cheese go to www.cheese.com. Lots of cheeses for the cheesiest of occasion.
As for the man taking your machines - you can always edit your hosts file and give the machines your own name. Avoid the man. Start your own community.
'Corporate' names devoid the machines of identity and reduce them to what they really are - hunks of machinary. Nice names give personality and it becomes easier to know them.
Personally I've come to name the computers on my home network after hostess products. It started with twinkie and took off from there. Now I've got : twinkie (linux) cupcake (win98) snowball (win3.1 laptop) ding-dong (power mac) ho-ho (sun3) My friends and I have talked about new names; a cluster named "assorted doughnuts" and name each one inside "frosted", "plain", etc. It beats the naming scheme at work; names like internet01, internet02, studentdc02. blah.
When I took my Alias|PowerAnimator course at U of T, the whole O2 lab was set up in the Faculty of Architecture building.
Therefore, all the O2s were named after famous architects, in alphabetical order around the room.
You alwaysk new what machine was which.
Right now, my hard drives are named: Bateau, Kusanagi and Alita, and my Jaz is Ido.
I'm a sucker for Anime, so that's where I would go if I was a sysadmin.
PPoE
Pope
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
We actually have multiple naming systems. We name hardware development's computers after classic cartoons (Snidely, Dudley, Rocky, Bullwinkle). We name software's computers after people that the softare guys have crushes on (Pam_Lee, Jodi_Foster [that dude worries me...], and my own machine, Barbara_Walters...). When we hook up the machines we're developing to the network, we call 'em all Fred-- Fred1, Fred2, etc. It's boring, but you don't have to worry about accidentally logging onto one of the development machines and screwing it up royally...
Of course, at home, it's a different story. Shakespeare and the Simpsons-- Shakespeare for Linux, Simpsons for NT. Apu, Verona, Moe, and Benvolio. And, no, the NT machines *aren't* mine...
Oh well... I gotta go... Barbara's acting up again... she's such a naughty girl...
The ISP where I used to work was actually a company that owned several ISPs. Three different domains with three different naming conventions.
One was the cities that the POP was in: laf for Lafayette; ind for Indianapolis, etc...
One was Star Trek characters: The DNS servers were kirk and spock for example.
And the other was kinda a mixture. The shell servers were named after planets, the web servers used a numeric system (vs-1, vs-2, etc...) but the primary authentication server was called cthulu, the DNS servers, kitten and cerebus. Weird.
The place I work for now uses a numeric system (company_name1.company_name.net, company_name2.company_name.net) which I find kinda annoying. You just have to remeber that mail is on 3, www is really 6, and so on.
But the best naming story is from where I used to work. We had a NT server that was the fileserver/proxy for our private IP PC LAN, called ntserver. Well, when they replaced it with a FreeBSD box, the name wasn't very appropriate. Since everyone was happy to see the buggy NT box go, its replacement got names ntsucks. However, that was changed when we realized that our customers that were telneted into our customer shell servers could see that we were logged on to those machines from ntsucks.isp.net when we were on doing maintenance. So someone decided we needed to change it to something that wouldn't offend NT using customers... Kid you not.. (It became tek, for "Technical Support")
-Wintermute
I personally use members of the addams family or song names from any of the mortal albums. Mortal is the name of my all time fave band. Thier first album was called lusis hence the lusis.org thing.
;)
My suggestion is possible use names that represent possibly room numbers, rack locations or possibly the purpose of the server. The racklocation/room number suggestion actually works best because you have a visual to go along with it. We use names like es1 and es2 for our exchange servers (bleh) and nts1,nts2 and so on for our nt servers (bleh bleh) and sql7 ( GAG! ) for a sql server. Just a suggestion. Of course we don't have nay official naming conventions here and isnce I'm the network admin I can name the beerstards what ever the hell I want
"We hope you find fun and laughter in the new millenium" - Top half of fastfood gamepiece
"Fighting the underpants gnomes since 1998!" "Bruce Schneier knows the state of schroedinger's cat"
The most clever set I've seen were in a workstation cluster at Carnegie-Mellon. Here's (approximately) how they went:
Hurricane
Tornado
Earthquake
Tsunami
Avalanche
Plague
Landslide
Mankind
Hmmm. I think are work (McKee Foods) I'd have problems with those names. First of all, we are forbidden to even mention Twinkies or Ho-hos. Second, if we named a machine Swissroll or NuttyBuddy or StarCrunch we'd confuse it for one of the production lines...
Instead we have really lame-o names like ORAD1 (Oracle Development 1), MFG1 (Manufacturing 1), etc...
Mine are all named after classic arcade games. They all have names like
Sinistar
Xevious
PacMan
Pong
Galaga
etc.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Wow! Cool ideas out there. I've been using charecters from Hamlet for several years. If I keep on with Shakespere, I should be set for life. At my school, they are using S/F ship names (Enterprise, Voyager, Capricorn, etc.
I drank what? -- Socrates
How about naming your machines after single-named celebrities. No worries about remembering if there's an underscore or not between first and last names. Easy to remember.
Madonna
Prince
Cher
Oprah
Liberace
Meatloaf
etc.
Ah...
:-)
So this is that thing they call humor. I have alvays felt like the RFCs from April 1 wha's of harder to use...
-- Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom.
-- Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom.
Much as I hate to pick a nit (well, not really):
An "iamb", according to Websters, is "a metrical foot consisting of one short syllable followed by one long syllable or of one unstressed syllable followed by one stressed syllable."
"Pentameter" indicates that a line of verse contains five parts. Thus, "iambic pentameter" is verse consisting of lines containing five iambs.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine was rather upset because someone at the big faceless yuppie infested company he works for got all upset over his .sig which read "People are funny, and they taste like chicken." So, another friend and I have changed our sigs as well. He has "My cat's breath smells like cat food" and I have the number Euclid spits out in the movie Pi.
3 9489139584959 7980465063
I get so sick of all this yuppiedom crapola. I try to entertain myself by giving my servers funny names. I have Holly and smeg and scutter - references from Red Dwarf (and yes, Holly is the monster mega server) and I have Tarantula as my webserver and then I have a machine named BigChief which we named when the Kansas City Chiefs were doing really well in the playoffs a few years ago.
I just get really ill at these social climbing twits who are in business. They ruin the little bit of fun us geeks can have. Perhaps we should all start naming our servers after characters in "Keeping Up Appearances"?
94141592651829395028512312356878594818483935819
8012456989047663620151201231566801865112556408748
Let's see here.... I only have a small number of boxen, so I don't have to worry as much. My main box (overclocked celeron) is called "arealms" as an abbreviation of the name of my old Renegade board. My 133 laptop is called "eclipse" for some reason which escapes me. I named it a couple of years back, okay? My 486sx25 laptop is called "icetea" simply because my friend suggested it over the phone while I was talking to him. :P My p233mmx is called "minidisc" because I named it a week after I got my first MD unit. :)
Prize: 1 virtual beer. 2 if you don't have to use a search engine
(Unfortunately, I live in Japan right now so the quality of the beer is somewhat lacking. If'n you want virtual sake, I can do that, too).
jawbone
corkscrew
sockemdog
gorilla
sunshine
tablesaw
pillow
ironring
The list could go on and on...
I'll tell you what really annoys me. I would love to give our servers meaningful names but we are stuck with things like CPQSV8 and the like, because of some idiots lack of inspiration.
k slash,emm,ehhh,eiii,elll
It does cause a problem for our support staff as the end users need to have the server name spelled out to them every time. We just wouldn't have this problem if we had names that they could recognise:
backslash,backslash bugsbunny, backslash, mail
as opposed to
backslash,backslash,cee,pee,cue,ess,vee,eight,bac
I know which I'd prefer...
AHEM!!!
Just recently I have had to deal with the mess created on two FAT32-formatted hard drives in unrelated locations. One of them apparently lost all long filename support and the other cannot be fixed by Scandisk at all. I had to use the Linux implementation of FAT32 (vfat) to recover data from one of the drives. In fact, Linux couldn't quite read it either and I had to reboot Linux repeatedly (the kernel, version 2.2.13, froze whenever it found an inconsistency.)
Both drives will have to be reformatted to be useful again. Nothing of this magnitude has happened with the ext2 partitions I've been using, but as always, YMMV.
My home network uses place names from The Lord of The Rings, such as Rivendell, Lorien, and Minas_Tirith.
--
Where I used to work (at a university), they had to come up with names for all the workstations in all the labs. Some themes: Football Teams Simpsons Characters Famous Prisons Cities Southpark Characters Candy and Pop the main mail servers were named after famous mailmen from TV (luckily we only had a couple main mail servers, there aren't a lot of famous mailmen from TV) For my home network, we use characters from "The Matrix": Neo Morpheus Nebuchadnezzar (or however it's spelled) WhiteRabbit
I tend to name my machines after Arthurian Legend
myrrthin,
nimue,
talisien, etc...
My other Net Admin prefers his own naming method
bofh.. his accounting machine
rtfm... user/helpdesk
pos... a former NT box
rubix... secure server
personally if it weren't for aliases, I would have hated logging into snuffleupagus.cmu.edu ( I don't know if I'M still spelling it correctly)
-- Life: Hate the Game... Love the cereal
We tried to come up with a naming theme for our servers that solved all of the common naming problems, and decided on characters from popular TV shows. One of my favorites was our mail server, Claven (as in Cliff Claven, the mailman on Cheers). This was great until a new employee started work whose last name was Glaven. I suppose whatever theme you use, there is always the possibility of confusion.
Joe Mainusch http://www.weber-amps.com
I work for an isp and we have a couple of server names:
ndaryl is one of our admin servers,
so is nimue. ndaryl is from the newheart show (larry, daryl, ndaryl) nimue is a mystical charictor for one of the Arthurian legendes,
Our name & mail servers are charliebrown, lucy, and snoopy. If you don't get where they come from please take head and very forcefully insert in ass.
either we are networking or we areNT networking
The University of Michigan had a pool of Unix boxes named after various baked goods....Toast, Pita, Muffin, Bagel, etc.....
-- Deputy Dan will find us no matter how far away we go.
ika TXT "proxy"
squid CNAME ika
ebi A 10.0.0.2
ebi HINFO "Sparc 2"
shrimp CNAME ebi
fugu A 10.0.0.3
fugu TXT "https"
blowfish CNAME fugu
kani A 10.0.0.5
crab CNAME kani
koi A 10.0.0.6
carp CNAME koi
news CNAME koi
tai A 10.0.0.7
tai TXT "firewall"
snapper CNAME tai
tako A 10.0.0.8
tako TXT "network monitor"
octopus CNAME tako
_____________________________________
Oh, and don't forget:
des A 10.0.1.1
blowfish A 10.0.1.2
twofish A 10.0.1.3
idea A 10.0.1.4
pgp A 10.0.1.5
rsa A 10.0.1.6
nsa A 10.0.1.7
nsa TXT "backup"
snakeoil A 10.0.1.8
snakeoil HINFO "NT"
snakeoil TXT "Couldnt resist"
Union Yes! Member of Technical Workers' Local 101010
I name all my machines after locations in Middle-Earth. Lorien, Rivendell, Mordor, Moria, Gondor, Arnor, Fangorn, Shire, Hobbiton, Bywater, Bree, Weathertop, Celebdil, Harad, Mirkwood, etc.
...
These are nice for a couple of reasons. Tolkien fans will never run out of names, (Check the index!) and they are mostly easy to pronounce. There's hundreds of Tolkien person-names, too. You could go with the names of the Valar: Manwe, Aule, Orome, Elbereth, Tulkas... or the names of elven-lords: Finwe, Elwe, Fingolfin, Finrod, Feanor, Celebrimbor..., or the names of the dwarfs in the Hobbit: Thorin, Fili, Kili, Bombir, Oin, Gloin, Balin, Dwalin
You can probably tell I'm a Tolkien fan. Sadly, at work the NT servers are... Beavis and Butthead. Sigh.
Torrey (Azog) Hoffman.
(Azog was the orc who killed Thorin's grandfather - one of the very few named orcs in Tolkien's stories. I chose the name originally for playing Quake on line... I should have changed it when I signed up on Slashdot. Oh well.)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
I named my local machines after forever knight characters:
Nikola
LaCroix
Jeanette
Schenke
Reese
Vachon
Screed
Not only are they different names, but they work well when you network is called "Forever Knet"
(yesyesyes bad pun)
A friend used:
Leandra
Kosh
Fuchikoma (thinktank)
My palm pilot just sits there.
Lowmag.net
When we recently rebuilt all of our servers my staff presented me with a variety of naming conventions for our servers. I rejected all of them.
My reasoning is that if all of our servers are named after the 7 Dwarfs, then once you guess one name, you're onto an idea for the others' names. Larger lists (table of elements, episodes of the original Star Trek, etc.). As a security precaution, I do not want anyone to have a clue about anything on our network.
As a result, we have completely unrelated names across our environment. The person responsible for a server knows its name, other people need not care.
Dave Bennett
Chief Information Officer
Inland Truck Parts Company
Dave Bennett
I use exciter, manalishi, sinner, ripper, etc. at home.
(name withheld by request)
A college back home called their mail server (Solaris) 'uhura'. I can't think of anything better for a dedicated sendmail machine than the name of a communications officer.
in our house we use names varying from FFVIII GF's to books by Terry Hatchet. I know someone who picked the name (tumbolia) for his machine out of 'GEB'. Actually our undergrad lab admins named some 50-60 nt workstations after the simpsons characters. It is quite fun to log onto Dr.MarvinMonroe or Mrs.Lovejoy.
But the prise goes a place where i worked over the summer. Two Sun Servers on it were named 'Cheech' and 'Chong', while 10 or so sparc stations were 'Crashalot', 'Useless', 'Pointless', 'Expendable', etc.
I was thinking of how to intentionally fail my drug test... It would make a good memoir story someday.
The general undergrad servers in our faculty (mathematics) are Sparc named after mathematicians. There are some named after spices, some named after chemicals (methane, butane, octane, and the like), which are for specific senior computer courses. ...
The computers of the other faculties are a little.. um... uninteresting though--artsmail, engmail, artsu1 (Arts), electrical, elecom2 (both for elec. eng. and com. eng.)
In my house (with 5 other fellow students), we simply name the computers after our nicknames or school userid (jsmith, for example). I use the same scheme for the workstations on my home LAN. The servers are named after famous musicians and artists. If I ever run out, I'll use characters from my favourite animes. =)
The company I'm currently working for uses userids for machine names (again), but the previous one uses color names for Windows workstations--I got darkgreen.
At my previous company, we named our machines after great writers (preferrably dead).
:)
My workstation was Asimov. Development server was Dickens. Production server was Burroughs. For a while, our office router was Shakespeare. The list goes on and on...
My current company names machines eon1, eon2, etc... With aliases for unusual female names (lola, farrah, etc...)
Jon Frisby, Senior Internet Software Engineer,
Personal Site (MrJoy.com)
MrJoy.com -- Because coding is FUN!
I use the Cthulhu mythos names from the books and mind of H.P. Lovecraft. If you are familiar with these then naming a firewall "nyarlothotep" makes some sense. Not only are they hard to remember but they're fun! :-) Here's a short list:
:-)
nyarlothotep
cthulhu
azathoth
hastur
nodens
cthugha
yig
yog-sothoth
ithaqua
nyogtha
shub-niggurath
tsathoggua
I've also used the planets from the Star Wars movies before (not the books). The one named tatooine was appropriate when the fan in the power supply died and it ran hot.
Auto models from a particular make (my little mopar.net has cuda, dart, ram, powerwagon, neon, etc.)
Seems to me that while clever and unique ones (like babylonian and other mythos) are clever and more fun, you're going to end up spelling things (and often explaining things) for users, thus eliminating any advantage over peints001.
They work good for us, but you are limited to about 100 machines. (Some of them are just too hard to spell). I like telneting to xenon or argon from silver.
Got a pair on NT domain controllers - Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
A small web server farm - madhatter, marchhare, dormouse.
For that finicky Oracle database server that seems to look at you distainfully no matter how you tune it - caterpiller.
And so on...
-----
Another one that we started using at my current company - constellations that aren't astrological signs. (That Oracle server becomes the vain Cassiopeia).
Server naming: fun for the whole family!
-a
The University of Illinois Mathematica lab has about two dozen workstations, all with beer names. Icehouse.math.uiuc.edu, miller.math.uiuc.edu...those are some good names.
-Barry
I started with the spice girls for my local network. But after Geri left the group I was left with only 4 possible machines. I had to name my FreeBSD box bond just cause the girls were lonley and needed someone to keep them company. My Slackware 4.0 lunchbox computer ended up being named BoB for obvious reasons. and I figured that bond was having too easy a time with Scary(95), Sporty(95), Posh(rh 6.1) and Baby(NetWare 4.11).
The best I've heard of is using the elements to name machines.. then you have a direct correspondence to IP address: Hydrogen => .1, Helium => .2 (and of course, you have nice shorter aliases like "he" and "li").
When you run out, start adding things like 'unnilquadium'. If you need another address block, start using compounds!
A firm I used to work at used snakes as names when I started. After going through the manual for "Elite", we had finally ran out. So, "oneeyed" and "trouser" appeared. At that point, we changed. =)
What better way to name a computer than after your favourite tipple? You'll NEVER run out of drinks, surely?
Budvar,
Glenmorangie,
Staropramen,
Stolichnaya,
Deuchars...
Mmmmm...
If I were a sysadmin, I'd do this too; it'd be cool for me, and give quite a few laughs to the rest of the staff (who would no doubt hate Pokemon):
Stephen: *rebooting server* "Don't log in on 'pikachu', it's dead."
Everyone else: "Hooray!"
"Uh oh, 'charizard' is hosed."
"'nursejoy' just went down..."
-Stephen
For industrystandard.org, I have named all of the boxen on one network segements after transformers (blurr, decepticon, optimus, etc), and the other segment after the characters of the upcoming Kevin Smith film "Dogma," which i have been eagerly awaiting for 2+ years. Some of the names are Azrael, Rufus, Serendipity, Loki, and Bartleby.
Jeff Croft
jcroft@industrystandard.org
----------
Jeff Croft
http://jeffcroft.com
If I never see another box named after a greco-roman god it will be too soon! Usually its a mix too. A few greek gods, a few roman gods and a thor and an odin thrown in for good measure as well. Nothing too imaginative.
:-) ]
Here we've got a large wall map of "The Canoe Routes of Algonquin Park" up in our server room. (Algonquin Park is a very large, very beautiful Provincial Park in the Cdn province of Ontario).
Our machines bear the names of lakes in Algonquin Park that many people here have enjoyed paddling across.
BOOTH
CACHE [currently serving as a router
CANOE
ERABLES
GALEAIRY
NORTHTEA
OPEONGO
OTTERSLIDE
PROVOKING
RADIANT
SMOKE
SOURCE (yes, an actual lake name!)
and so forth...
[We don't come from a planet. We come from a grid sector.]
The small office I worked in named machines after
Middle Eastern capitals. The gateway router was
suez. Other machines were telaviv, baghdad, etc, etc. A lot of available names, most of which are short and easy to type. They also sound vaguely professional.
Oh, man, this isn't flamebait, it's funny.
Some moderator with a moderate sense of humor please moderate this post up!
Nah... A webserver should be named www(.subdomain.domain.tld), but www should just be a CNAME with the box having its own distinct name too, so that you can plug in a new box, change the CNAME, and can still use both boxen using their original name..
And so on for all possible services you run..
--
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
At one of my previous places of employment, we had 4 machines to name. We had a contest and it came down to the Four Elements (earth, water, air and fire) or The Four Horsement (Plague, War, Famine, and Death) who were my personal choice. The bosses picked the elements cause they were worried about customers (who occasionally had to access the machines) freaking out.
Skippy
"False modesty is the refuge of the incompetent." - The Stainless Steel Rat
As the article mentioned, there are two goals behind a name. One goal is that you want to give your server some life and personality, and the other is that you want people to be able to find the services that they are looking for. One way to do both effectively is to use DNS aliases liberally.
Set up your server with whatever name you want, but create an alias for each important service that you have. Creating an alias is cheap and it can also end up preventing the problems that happen when a service is moved from one server to another.
As an example, I have a server named roland, but not many people call it that. To most people it is either ns, pop, imap, mail, mailhost or smtp. If I ever have to move mail service to another system I don't have to worry about notifying everyone that ywain now handles mail, as they're most likely using mail as the name already (and I just change where the alias points).
We used to have a tree naming convention, I
got real tired of sitting around listening about
how Fir and Elm were doing. Ack!
So we switched to anti tree names:
Chainsaw
Axe
Beaver
Chipper
Shredder
etc...
I'm a bit surprised noone have mentioned them already. Where I'm in charge of the computer network I name all (new) machines after WOT (that is Wheel Of Time)-characters.
:)
At home I have Lanfear, Aviendha and Moghedien.
At work there's Liandrin and Moiraine. (My boss wanted to call the new SGI-machine "blue" but I wouldn't let him
Sometimes conventions occur, whch when started are just a little joke...
But after time they're almost an institution.
Like here in out computer society, we have:
MrChatterbox (A routing box)
MrBusy (Primary login server)
MrWorry (A box which we're always afraid is going to fall over)
MrBounce (He goes up and down frequently)
MrTall (He's got all the storage)
ad so it goes on...
What started as a joke, has evolved into a semi-resonable scheme. Keep the faith people, dont let *THEM* get their way!
Back when I was in school, the university had some really creative naming schemes for their labs. My favorite was the missiles lab which included such testosterone-laden names such as MX, Scud, Polaris, Hellfire, etc. One of the mechanical engineering labs was fittingly themed around muscle cars: Stingray, Mustang, Impala, Roadrunner, Cobra, etc.
There was one lab whose naming scheme I couldn't figure out. That lab had names such as Rain, Cats, Dogs, Snow and Airplanes. I asked my friend who worked for the networking group about it, and he explained the lab was themed around "things that fall from the sky."
I definitely go for videogame supervillains. Unfortunately they get to be a little too like their counterparts. Sephiroth (my main machine) is just pure evil. Kefka (our server) is psychotic, and every once in a while just does something completely random, then looks innocent so he can get something. (Swear!) Krelian (spare machine) is far more powerful than you could possibly imagine at first, and Ganon (laptop) keeps having the *same* problems, over, and over, and over... It also makes me wonder whether or not those random blips on the hub aren't the computers attempting to take over the world.
I used to have all of my machines named after obscure names from my favorite Japanese animation of mine (but most people don't know that)...
Things like: Mina, Amelia, Gourry, Zelgadis, Rezo, Lina, etc...
But I recently switched them over to these sorts of names: panic, fear, doubt, uncertainty, stupidity, idiocy, apathy, futility, failure, etc...
But I was thinking of naming the Windows machines with names like that - and than name the Linux machines the opposite - calm, courage, conviction, certainty, etc...
Mina
Mina Inerz [N. Reinking]
For the CS department at my university, we have:
alacritas (alacrity)
depravitas (depravity)
vanitas (vanity)
profanitas (profanity)
etc
In Information Systems:
Boston
Manhattan
Chicago
On my next door neighbour's LAN:
ghost
spectre
demon
wraith
vampire
spirit
Yeah.
Korolev ran the Soviet space program during the sixties, I believe.
The party's over
I have named all my machines after bread-related products.
Toast - my workstation
Jelly - my wife's workstation
Tray - the machine that serves Toast and Jelly
Grill - the machine that is the gateway and firewall for Toast, Jelly and Tray
I went with Star Wars planets. Coruscant, endor, tatooine, naboo, deathstar ... it goes on and on and on...
the lead sysadmin at my last job was a missionary kid in Central America as a child.
No kidding.. here were our server and workstation names....
chinantec
winnebago
amuzgo
tetzal
tehachape
kickapoo
hell - we spent more time explaining how to spell and how to SAY the names of the servers than we did remembering what server did what.
the strange thing was - in most other ways, the sysadmin had a clue.
___
"I know kung-fu."
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
It's probably too late in this thread to be of use, but RFC 1178 has a good discussion of this exact problem. It often helps in this discussion as an appeal-to-authority argument, which works better on PHBs than technical folks.
Now I use element names. Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium...
I also assign the IP address on my local net based on their atomic number.
This also gives each host/server an easier to type one or two character alias: (H, He, Li,...)
If I grow enough to run out of elements, I can switch to molecules (water, salt, ...)
the sysop who takes care of the students lab at Paris 7 has the most wicked imagination, and he is a hendrixaholic.
s hadow r d-the-bills
look for yourself:
ain-t-no-fun-waiting-round-to-be-a-millionaire
have-you-seen-your-mother-baby-standing-in-the-
i-m-mad-like-eldridge-cleaver
i-wanna-be-your-dog
a-song-in-a-very-cellular-way
pissing-in-a-river
what-kind-of-girl-do-you-think-we-are
your-pretty-face-is-going-to-hell
we-won-t-get-fooled-again
the-lonesome-death-of-hattie-carroll
i-may-be-wrong-but-i-won-t-be-wrong-always
you-shouldn-t-call-the-doctor-if-you-can-t-affo
---
Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
I like to call my machines names.
My dial-up server is "sucker".
One workstation is "loser".
Another one is "retard".
And of course, I have "stupid", "idiot", and my file server is "biglug".
These are all running Windows 98. When they crash, I can actually yell at them, and insult them at the same time.
Imagine having these names at your disposable to be able to freely yell at the boxes without feeling guilty.
Other good ones:
weirdo
dud
flamer
bottlenose
sugarface
dillsmack
liverlips
penileimplant
nipplewurst
stinkmeat
kannniggit
pimplefinger
bill
maggotpie
And of course, there are many others. Feel free to call your machines by these names! The more you do it, the better you'll feel. You can truly show that you are the dominant one in your technology relationship.
Agape,
Suqur.
Sparc5/64meg/2gig - mainframe
:)
Its always fun when people ask where something is, and you can tell them 'Its on mainframe'.
Of course, for some reason, this tends to really disturb those who know what the machine actually is
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Don't forget one of the most addictive drugs of all, Nitrozac!
A server named Nitrozac won't need booted often, but oh, those boots!
At my old job, our servers were named after serial killers. We had Ripper, Dahmer, Manson, Gacey, Stalker (Richard Ramirez), OJ (Simpson...not technically a serial killer, but funny anyway).
:)
Too bad my new company has boring names like NS1, NS2, WWW, etc...
--= ThreeTee =--
Or my person favourite
Win Doesn't
And there I was thinking it was New Technology.
Maybe that's what it really means
Windows No Text
Because you can't have a text only mode.....
Or then again
Maybe not
At my work, Penn College (www.pct.edu) we name our servers after famous physics people.
hmm. here goes:
Einstien - AIX WWW
Hawking - Linux news
Bohr - Firewall monitor
and then there are my boxes, at work i do Nine Inch Nails names.
Ruiner - My graphics box
Reptile - WWW staging
Violent - Game Server
Piggy - CDROM GOD
Closer - MP3 Box
home:
scary movies in pairs:
Leviathan - mine (NT)
DeepStarSix - linux
Mother - dns 1 (bsd)
father - mail (linux 1.2.13 i dont need to upgrade damnit)
homer, bart, lisa, maggie, dr nick, chief wiggum ... the list is endless
All of my Linux boxen has been named after filovirii, hanta, dengue and ebola (which in their turn are named after the places where they first were spotted).
If I'd have more hosts to name I probably would go for names from the Final Fantasy series such as cactros, sabotander and quistis. There are lots of cool names to choose from there.
Personally I'd hate to use cute names like bugsbunny and goofy.
"But I'm still like a little kid, see?
I just don't know when to quit."
- Rei
My G4 is named Alice..with 2 sub drives being named Tea Party and Wonderland...The other systems that will be hooked up soon will be MarchHare, Hatter, Dormouse (those three are a set of SPARC stations), Knave, Queen, WhiteRabbit(the router), and so forth... -DW
~Donald / Just RTFM
I make no effort to hide the fact that I enjoy roller coasters. Hence, a few names I've already taken for machines at home and work, plus a few I plan to use Any Day Now:
cyclone
phoenix
alpengeist
comet
magnum
medusa
steelforce
twister
phoenix was given to a machine that had suffered a nasty meltdown (it rose from the ashes, natch) and alpengeist's nickname was "alpie". Makes learning fun!
Then one day I wanted to name a cluster of four:
pestilence
famine
death
war
but then I realized those names would be better suited to a basket of kittens. Really! Who could resist the cute charms of the Four Kittens of the Apocalypse?
When I worked at Apple, our Cray was called "tma1" - you know, from 2001? Now THAT is a cool name!
They also gave everyone with an account a t-shirt that said "My other computer is a Cray." Apple always had good t-shirts.
- davevr
----
Dave
"I love chess! It is like ballet only with more explosions!"
- Dave
Given the latest Slashdot article about IDG's efforts to protect its "For Dummies" trademark from being used in listserv postings, you might want to permission from Eisner before naming servers after Disney characters.
Let's hope Disney lawyers don't get any ideas from this post.
1) Nifflheim
2) Valhalla
3) Nirvana
4) Asgard
5) Olympus
I have winnie ( the mail server, dependable not so smart) ,tigger (my own machine, a bouncy Dual PII) and eeyore (the router/firewall, always complaining, and looking a bit morose) in domain poohcorner.
I had two machines at home to start with, so, I named them fantasy and reality.
;)
Only problem was I got another machine, so I thought for a bit, and came up with virtuality. Then came the fourth... spirituality, now there is a fifth live one... it's called...
insanity.
I think if I get another box my wife will name it depravity
Everyone is living in a personal delusion, just some are more delusional than others.
I name all my boxes after RPG characters. My server Wedge (from FF), workstation Ganon (from Zelda), gateway Sentri (from Ultima 7), extra play-toy Rufus (from FF7), and my laptop Tifa (from FF7).
Derek Lewis
Derek Lewis
(remove the spam-free to email me)
berkowitz
bundy
manson
dahmer
or skin conditions:
psoriasis
eczema
hives
melanoma
Even though my domain is just reserved and not active yet, I have begun naming my computers on the 'hous' theme.
gate.hous.net (Linux gateway box)
fire.hous.net (experimental Linux firewall box)
club.hous.net (NetBSD plaything)
tree.hous.net (OpenBSD plaything)
power.hous.net (Personal Mac)
bug.hous.net (Laptop that I play chess on)
mad.hous.net (Linux/Be/Win98 box)
whore.hous.net (the pr0n server. jk)
littlepink.hous.net (John Cougar Mellencamp fan server - just kidding again!)
I like this naming convention because not only can the name of the computer be related to function (gate, fire), but it can also be related to the type of computer (mad- too many personalities!). Not to mention, there are more 'hous' names than computers that I would want to deal with in my apartment. (heh)
On the whimsical side, you could name your computers/servers after all the 80's glam rock bands:
Winger
Warrant
Ratt
Slaughter
WhiteLion
Alias
Poison
BonJovi
MotleyCrue
...ad nauseum...
Well, I thought I read on a Government of Canada Website that it hadn't been decided yet, but perhaps they have chosen NU:
http://www.gov.nu.ca/
Like from Evangelion: Melchior, Casper, Balthasar.
http://howto.linuxberg.com/rfc/rfc1178.txt has some good advice on naming. And, after all, its an internet RFC :) The best advice involves not using people's names for machines: "John's hard drive just crashed."
Changes aren't permanent, but change is.
Our SGIs are named after the fireman from Trumpton;
Pugh, Pugh, (its a multiprocessor machine),Barney, Mcgrew, Cuthbert, Dibble and Grub.
Our Decs are named after indian foods, so we have Balti and Bhaji.
The Meterological Office used to have a pair of Crays called Ronnie and Reggie...
Dill, Gherkin, Vlasic, etc. .^
see this if you don't understand.
^.
bluebottle
eccles
seagoon
crun
minnie
moriarty
grytpype
greenslade
bloodnok
littlejim
and plenty more where those came from...
Jeff
Well,
We have named all of our NT servers after nuclear disasters, tjernobyl, harrisburg, sellafield. I expect more nuclear plants to blow up by the time we get new nt-servers.
Our unix boxes come from Calvin and hobbes, workstatations are named from diffrent kind bears, dogs and petrol stations.
At my work we have a few rather odd networks. The first one i worked on was named after the moons of saturn and jupiter. This worked well becaue Jupiter and Saturn were domains. After that they sent my team off to a new project, we named all our servers after smurfs. Hefty gets to do Database stuff, Grouchy monitors the network, vanity serves out pages. Its really knda fun, and you get to have all sorts of fun with security stuff.
Lissell (where have all the cowboys gone?)
Animal names. That's what we ended up using. It works well if you want to match a certain person with a certain animal as well (we accidently paired one of our friends up with weasel!) We made an alphabetical list of a to z of animal names, and then again. (x was hard) this worked out quite well because it's easy to remember which server you were on by picturing the animal.
At home, I took the ideas thrown out during the meeting and applied it. So we now have machines at home named lsd (the linux box, everyone uses it!) alcohol (mine) hardcider (my secondary) morphine (my roommates) prozac (my other roommates) crystalmeth (the gateway)... etc.
anyway, it was fun. and still confuses our vistors. 'Yeah, I think I have it loaded on crystal meth... if not, it should be on lsd.' `8r)
--
Gonzo Granzeau
Gonzo Granzeau
"Nothing the god of biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for.." -Roy Batty
We have the most annoying naming convention. All the sun boxen running slowaris are named sun4sXXX. Those running SunOS are sun4cXXX (I still don't understand what c and s really signify but they fit that pattern). The HP9000 boxen are all name usxXXX. I don't even remember any of the vaxen. Then the personal sun workstations are named csicrnXX (I know crn means Carrollton where we are located, haven't a clue about csi though). These names and the servers behind them are random and meaningless. I remeber when we found out that sun4s028 actually sat on someones desktop. And sun4s038 the server I deal with the most had a faster link added and for some reason got renamed csicrn67, but it actually sits in the server room and is not a workstation. The PCs break the most important rule. Company standard (stricktly enforce by Office Automation (The PC gestopo)) is all PCs (mostly Win95 and WinNT) are name LastnameFirstinitial.
My university is a little better. Except there really isn't much of a convention. People just name servers whatever. One of the main public servers is misleadingly named apache. But my favoriot name for a server is the huge multiprocessor sun machine (the most powerfull on campus) is appropriately named Ra (the sun god).
Another interesting naming scheme was that of my old ISP. I never really understood it until I saw them all at once:
feenix
fiinix
fohnix
fumnix
-E29
I'm in Computer Science.
Management is our enemy.
On my previous project, I named my SQL servers after Greek Gods. After starting with the names ZEUS and APOLLO, I even managed to convice some of my users that my naming convention was "the names of the dogs of Higgins in the TV series Magnum P.I" :-)
-- Nothing is as subjective as reality --
Big things:
behemoth, gigantor, titanic, colossus, mammoth, marmaduke, olympic, moby, etc.
Quarterbacks:
marino, favre, montana, jaworski, bledsoe, simms, starr, elway, aikman, testaverde, tarkenton, bradshaw, young, etc.
Roman Emperors:
julius, augustus, claudius, caligula, nero, trajan, heliogabolus, tiberuis, vitellus, vespasian, eugenius, constantine, etc
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
And if you had a NT server on the network, would it be called Jeltsin??? ;)
Almost each time I've seen him on TV he seemed a bit unstable
(of course not a Soviet leader, but almost)
The math department where I was in grad school went with mathematicians' last names - cauchy, riemann, etc. I thought this was classy, if predictable.
ping barbarella...
I've always wanted to use the 'tower' names for gateways or firewalls.
DRouse
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
But only if you have a few servers, there are really only two machine names in his books. But the ones he had sound good:
valis (for a SMP machine?)
albemuth (for an old machine? a gateway?)
If you had any more I would vote for obscure ScFi computer names, none of this hal, wintermute stuff. Any more obscure SciFi machine names out there?
-- I browse at +5 with stripped sigs
of coarse you could always name your firewall "news", your mail server "firewall" and your news server "mail", to truly foul them up.
.sig
matisse:~$ cat
Brian
Howie_D
Kevin
Nick
A room of out of control Win98 boxes, which will be completely out of style next year. ...
--
I wrote the play & still own the script
I like a naming system that is fun and functional. I use cartoon characters for my home network, but this type of naming convention does not always work.
If you have a large number of computers in one area, you probably wouldn't want to take the time to come up with a cool name. At Texas A&M University, the largest of our student computer labs has 553 computers spread out on two floors. What if you were told to fix Fuzzy? How would you know what computer that is without having to look at a cheat sheet? It makes sense to use a prefix for the location followed by a computer number. For example SCC1001 could mean Student Computing Center, 1st floor computer 1. This is what the university uses for all of its student computer labs. If you are told to fix BLOC035, you know that it is in the Blocker open access lab and it is computer number 35. Sure, you'll have to look for computer 35, but at least you know what room it is in (plus the computers are in numerical order for the most part, so they are easy to find). On the largest campus land wise in the US, this type of system is needed to keep track of the 1100+ computers for student use.
On the other hand, the supercomputing center uses names with the "big" sound for thier "big" computers. For example, the Origin 2000 is named titan, The Power Challenge XL is named terminator and the Cray is cyclops. Most other departments use "fun" naming schemes since their networks are on a smaller scale.
So in some cases a fun naming shceme can work, but in other cases it can be too confusing and work to a disadvantage.
Peter Gogas
Once I was doing some work at a company that had a 3-site WAN of NT and Novell. The names were ridiculous: bosntmail2114 bosnovfile121214 roxnt5665645. While it's can be easier to figure out what the names mean if you're reading the list in Explorer, it's a pain to sort through a lost of 100 server names that look alike. Server names that are regular words are easier to remember, but you can't get figure out what the server is for from the name. BTW, my father likes to use names like "jehovah" (home computer) and "goat", "tonsils", "frog" and all sorts of strange names (but it's not surprising considering that he calls himself Father Goat Tonsils!
That gives 24 names which should be plenty for small - mid-range enivironments. Since it has a
built-in hierarchy identification is easy.
Omega is the Domain name and PDC
Alpha is the first workstation or server, etc.
Here's the list:
alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta, theta, iota, kappa, lambda, mu, nu, xi, omnicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, upsilon, phi, chi, psi, omega.
bwill@bwill.net
"You're either outstanding, or outprocessing"
Granted, not in a professional setting, but I use the name of the element which corresponds to the last segment of the IP. Which works pretty good until you get much above 100.
-Steve, posting from europium
(quake3 server on dubnium)
------- Driver carries less than 64K of cache.
I don't have a network, but I have have several hard drives/partitions on my Mac. They all have Simpsons' icons and/or names. Right now, I have:
And the backup CDs I make also have Simpsons icons: Sideshow Rahim, Professor Frink. My Zip disks include: Chief Wiggum, Edward the Pentinent, and Jasper.
I've also given software I've written Simpsons' codenames - Jimbo, Kearney, Nelson, Krabappel, Milhouse.
I also have some Calvin & Hobbes ones I'll be using soon. I probably won't run out of icons or names anytime soon.
The Happy Blues Man
The Happy Blues Man
I accept on blind faith that Cincinatti exists.
I once had a naming scheme imposed upon me where the first 5 letters of the hostname would be the city where the machine was installed, followed by a letter indicating it's usage, followed by 2 digits to make it unique (usually the last octet in the ip address).
The first breakdown was when we decided to swap the usage of two systems, victm02 with victo03. If we were to install them fresh, then we'd have named them victo02 and victm03, but because the systems were not fresh installed when the usage changed, we had the 'o' system on the 'm' machine and vice versa.
The second breakdown was when we moved a system from Newark NJ to Mansfield NJ, then a system which was called newam02 wasn't actually in Newark.
If it was easy to change hostnames, then these problems wouldn't exist, but it's not that easy. There are references to the old name on many locations, including human brains which are hard to update :-).
This isn't just an example with that organization, for many years a major UUCP hub was MCVAX, which for much of it's life was a Sun.
Here in my office we use Medieval names and terms.
Galahad, Gallagher, Mordred, Lancelot, Merlin, yadda, yadda, yadda
All of our printers are named after trees
Oak, Ash
Our sysadmins have weird names. Most are a conotation of their own names. Our mail releay servers are Grunt Groan. hmmmm....
Personally I think if you're gonna do it, you should have fun with it. Pick something you're garunteed to like and never forget:
Missionary, Doggie, On-top, oral, Jenna-Jameson.....
;-)
RP
At my previous employer, I was the de facto Network Administrator. Before I started doing that job in addition to my development job, when I had first joined the company, they had one server named ATLPROD1. This office was in Atlanta, it was a production server, and it was NT (which seems to prefer CAPITALIZATION).
A few months down the road, there was a development server added, which inevitably became ATLDEV1. The trend had begun and there appeared to be no stopping it. Next came ATLDEV2, and it went on from there.
One day, ATLPROD1 died and was replaced very rapidly with a brand new box called, of course, ATLPROD1. When the box formerly known as ATLPROD1 was fixed (you see where this is going?), it was temporarily called ATLPROD2. We then decided that ATLGATE (the crappy P90 they had given me for the Linux firewall, surprise surprise) needed to be decommisioned, so we took it out of production service and named it ATLGATE2, switched ATLDEV2 to ATLGATE, and switched ATLPROD2 to ATLDEV2. Needless to say, this was confusing.
If each computer had been given it's own name and, hence, it's own identity, letting everybody know that different computers were going to be doing different jobs would be as easy as explaining new jobs that people they know will be doing.
RP
The library at the University of North Dakota names all of its machines after famous authors. Last night, I specifically sat down at Keats over Fitzgerland simply because it better fits my personality.
For what its worth, I once worked with a printer that named its Mac file servers (hey--its publishing, guys) in the following order: Lorem, Ipsum, Dolorem, etc.
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
The library at the University of North Dakota names all of its machines after famous authors. Last night, I specifically sat down at Keats over Fitzgerland simply because it better fits my personality.
For what its worth, I once worked with a printer that named its Mac file servers (hey--its publishing, guys) in the following order: Lorem, Ipsum, Dolorem, etc.
----
Am I the only one who thinks Microsoft is a misnomer? Perhaps Macrosoft would be a better fit?
My home network:
Larry
Moe (the server, naturally)
Curly
Shemp
Curlyjoe
If I add anything to my network, it will need to be named Joe Besser (ugh). Then my network will no longer be able to expand.
-Steve
Democracy is a poor substitute for liberty.
The hardware on my home network is named: Calvin, Hobbes, Moe, Dilbert, Dogbert, Catbert, Odie, Garfield, John, and Jason.
Some of the names of machines at my university are fraser, beufort, tucana, alrishia, and wheatston.
...si hoc legere nimium eruditionis habes...
I love to have cool names for servers (mine is Mr. Server (Like Mr. Coffee)) but in large companies it's totally impracticle. On large wans they should denote server type and location. For example: NTPA01 is an NT box in Pennsylvania number one. Boring but it makes more sense then logging into Zeus and not knowing where the hell it is, IMHO ;-)
Have a Happy.
Oh, dear....
Helpdesk tell you how to name servers?!?!
Have you ever read BOFH?
Works for 7 servers: Pride Envy Gluttony Lust Wrath Covetousness Sloth
Plagues: Famine, pestilence, locusts, etc...
On the flipside, obscure biblical names and saints are pretty cool too, like Enoch, Ephram, Enosh, Methuselah, Gershon, etc. Some of those lists of begats go on and on...
You could always use the name of people in the computer industry. Stallman, Torvalds, Jobs, Gates, etc. I kind of like Postel for the DNS box.
At home we currently have the following
Yoda - The old 486 laptop with the dead battery
Kiki - My girlfriends PC
MojoJojo - My PC
ProfessorX - The file and print server
Gnat - Firewall/NAT box running GantBox of course.
Blossum/Bubbles/Buttercup - The test box name dependant on OS currenting running.
Of course this is better in a university setting, but a friend of mine uses Polish mathematicians as his server naming scheme.
:).
Personally I use characters from _Animal_Farm_.
My first server is snowball
electric barbarella?
I'll plug you in... dim the lights - electric barbarella
slashdot username - at - email.domain.name
One of the computer labs here at school used to have computers named after:
The Seven Deadly Sins (lust, sloth, gluttony...)
Blender speeds (whip, chop, blend...)
Phobias (agro, arachno, claustro...)
Unfortunately, the got rid of the the Sins. It was really fun connecting to "lust" to work on my CS homework...
-ElJefe
oops, the guy I described was Korolev. Tsiolkovskiy was another Russian teacher who did not really make a big contribution.
Korolev is the big guy and thats easier to type.
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
goddard
oberth
Tsiekovsky sounds correct for their bad mammajamma designer guy. Spent years in the Gulag because Stalin didn't understand his ideas about rocketry, but still worked hard to win the moon race because he belived in our future in space. Gotta respect that.
Red Star in Orbit by James Oberg is a pretty good overview of the Russian space program.
Don't forget Werner Von Braun when you need a forth name.
I am implementing a similar scheme at home, based on the Mercury Seven. My Linux server will be Shepard (Alan Shepard) and my Linux/Win9x machine will be Grissom (Gus Grissom). Space heros rule.
At work we have a complicated convention for our groups machines. They are cars that are named after animals. Jaguar, Mustang, Impala and such. Preferably fast cars. We generally try to get a model of the car in question to put on top of the monitor, but recently that's been hard. Anyone know where you'd find a model kit for an AMC Hornet?
if ($it != $onething) {$it = $another;}
1) The one used at Columbia University for the time-sharing machines: translations of 'hello'...ie hello, caio, dag, konichiwa, mohoram...
2) The one used (for a short time) in my department at work: Star Wars planets...ie Dathomir, Alderaan, Kashyyyk, Corellia, Kessel, Dagobah...
The Star Wars planets get even more varied depending on what sources you take as canon. For me, it's the movies and the LucasArts productions.
But as everyone has proven here, there are no limits in terms of the types and numbers of naming conventions.
Personnally I went for the drink line, because there are alot of them... pretty lame.... BUT
You can type the drinks, so the big unix boxes where spirts, and smaller ones beers.
I used lagers for Xterms cos there are a bit week.
Leaving achopops for the NT servers.
Softdrinks for PCs. (diet ones laptops)
My box is absinth.
At my old site we used a name like:
[2 char site id][1 char subnet][low order IP]
Therefore my old system was 'bah123', e.g. Basingstoke, subnet h, 123, or [x].[x].8.123
With a lot of machines this worked really well, you can always get the IP from the name, and the names are short and reasonably easy to remember/infer, better than 'xxfgsun5y3ffghy', etc.. It looks professional enough to keep the Pointy Heads happy.
Ok, it's still boring, but at least it works.
Of course at my new company we use cartoon characters, my hpux box is called 'druuna'. Cludos to anyone who gets this, and understands why I smile everytime I play with her..
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
My machines both at work and at home already have established naming conventions, but if I were starting out now, I'd use names like seismo, utzoo, cbosgd, allegra, and ihnp4 -- for obvious reasons.
Of course, this provides motivation for anyone who tries to hack the place...
"Gotta' crash 'em all!"
Windows is not a virus. Viruses actually do something.
Texas, Chainsaw, Massacre?
For my own personal machines I use the names of the Kingdoms of the North, and other important dark age placenames from this part of the world; this is posted from Gododdin, my web server is Rionedd, I also have Caleddon and (now long retired) Rheged. They're memorable and not likely to be confused with anything else.
For my company's machines we use names of bits of weaving technology (thus Beater, Comb, Dyebath...); for one customer who is an antigue dealer we use names of bits of old tachnology (Astrolabe, Ballista...); for my previous company we used names of rivers in Galloway (Ae, Bladnoch, Cree, Dee...).
I agree with all those who have said that naming machines with quirky 'real' names is fun. But it's also practical, because these names are memorable. There was a practice at some point during the Roman empire of naming your children Primus, Secundus, Tertius and so on. It didn't last; these names are not memorable, and so are not practical
By all means (as several people have said) use CNAMEs to associate functional (or descriptive) names with machines, but make the principal name quirky.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
I've named my home machines after characters on Voyager:
I had a name for my Apple IIGS for a while, too, but I haven't had need to bring up Marinetti in a while, so it normally doesn't participate in the home network at this time. (It does have a null-modem link to Chakotay, through which it can be used as a dumb terminal.)
The domain for all of 'em, of course, is ncc74656.org. :-)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
(of course, there's still some humor in there, with velveta, whiz, nacho, rat, government, etc).
Other naming schemes I've seen:
Other things which you could use (none of which are really professional):
If you think about it, there's plenty of lists to work with...
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
When I was working at GWU, they started trying to transition it so that servers were named after gods. (something about us naming a machine 'tiberium' right about when C&C came out) Of course, the only one that ever got named was the listserv box (hermes). I then suggested that we rename the quake server to Bacchus, and well, for some reason, we never used that naming convention again.
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Your employer can't argue with the professionalism of the names used by the automotive industry. There are hundreds if not thousands of names to choose from and you can infer use or power of a host based on the type. ie:
civic - SparcStation LX running NetBSD
(Small boxs that runs forever)
hummer - beefed up Alpha running Linux for user shells
-Rusty
The Master (Angelo Rossitto) in Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, "Not shit, energy!"
If you only have seven (or less) machines, you could go for Gaiman's Endless:
Death, Destiny, Dream, Destruction,
Desire, Despair, Delirium
Or Buffy Characters:
Buffy, Cordelia, Giles, Willow, Xander,
Angel, Doyle, Anya, Oz, etc.
Or something a little more frivilous:
Gilligan, Skipper, MaryAnne, Professor,
MrHowell, MrsHowell, Ginger
My current hostname (which I got to choose myself) is based on a climbing term...thus:
biner, grigri, bight, belay, ascender,
boulder, bomber, crimper, sloper...
"My God...It's full of ads!" -Fry, about the Internet, Futurama
The company I work for used to have the word 'dot' in its name (dotOne.com) before getting acquired.
First of all, if the caps are missing, most people read it as do tone, but it does present some fun with punctuation.
One box was named dot. Its full name was dot.dotone.com, ie. dot-dot-dot-one-dot-com. Its successor was know as cubed (ie. dot^3).
A box that I was responsible for naming was called slash (before I found out about slashdot.org... I swear!) Its full name read as slash-dot-dot-one-dot-com. Tee hee.
Intentionally confusing names can be fun.
I use the X-Men for my internal network at home.
If the OS on the server/ws has a GUI, then I will put a wallpaper featuring that X-Men.
If you want something professional, use the the real names of the X-Men
Xavier
Summers
Grey
Drake
McCoy
Pride
Logan
LeBeau
(there was a time that I could name the entire cast of the X, with real names, without breaking a sweat)
Of course, it is always cooler to go with names like iceman, gambit, beast, cannonball, bishop or maverick. What about the villians? Magneto (very bad for computers), sinister or mojo?
sunfire.chozsun.com and sunspot.chozsun.com wouldn't happen to be your firewalls, eh?
ChozSun [e-mail]
ChozSun
ChozSun.com
Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen... and at least one slot open for expansion.
The directory server, of course, is named Claus.
Oddly, there is a Rudolph, but there are no user accounts on it... Presumably they're waiting for a foggy night.
(751 comments and counting... If you're reading this, I'm impressed.)
MSK
At work our naming convention is comets and stars Except for the workstations not owned by IT - then we give them boring names ;)
:)
At home i do something similar - astronomers... Tycho, Kepler, Cassini... etc... etc.. etc..
Keep on a theme, people.
In my house
Server Brie
Camembert, Gouda, Edam, Gruyere, Cheddar, Jarlsberg and Emmental.
At work
Ekki, Ftang, Ni, Five, Zoot and Bastard
I admin about 60 boxes, and someone who claims to be a network architect brought with him a brutally logical naming convention.
2 letter site code by city
1 digit o/s code (1=nw 2=nt)
2 letter purpose code
2 digit server number
"p"/"d" for production or development
The purpose codes are AS for application server, FS for file server, NF for network fax, NS for Notes server, PS for proxy server, and others are written as needed.
The server number is supposed to be incremented only by O/S code since that allows changing purpose, location and production/development status with few implications. We started resetting server numbers at each location, though, much to his chagrin.
99% of the admins hate it, but I think it grows on you. I never thought that I would memorize the departments served by a server named pp1fs03p but it works. It may also help to remember the boxes if I actually built them! I can't tell you what runs on some of them.
Also, in this new world of frequent mergers and acquisitions, these server names are resistant to company name changes.
Intelligent Life on Earth
For the parts of the network in my house that
I have control over, I use the Muses (the demigods
that inspire art and artists).
My main Linux box is Erato ("Lyric Art").
My File (MP3) server is Aoede ("Song").
My Win2k RC2 box is Melpomene ("Tragedy").
My NT4 development server is Thalia ("Comedy")
My Sparc20 with an Oracle6 database is Clio ("History")
I chose Muses 'cause most of the names are
generally cool.
There are 15 or so identified muses in greek
myth. I suppose if I ever ran out of those I'd
move to the Graces, then Fates, then Furies.
I agree that Greek gods are overdone in general,
though. Babylonian (Marduk, Tiamat, Gilgamesh) or
Lovecraftian (Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep) are much more
entertaining.
A cluster of Linux boxen named after pagan Finnish
gods has a certain flair as well.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
Well..after reading this article i realized that i have a very sad naming scheme.
/.
Workgroup: mbrez
croom_001_ws - My machine
croom_002_ws - Dads machine
aroom_001_ws - Sister's
croom_001_linsrv - linux box
So I got thinking..why am I using those!
I decided to rename
Workgroup: Simpsons
Lisa - My machine (fast..smart..leader)
Homer - Dads Machine (slow..ugly..dumb)
Maggie - Sister's (stupid..just there)
Apu - Linux Box (serves up stuff)
Future names:
MrBurns - Fileserver (tons of money..tons of space)
Marge - Print server (always complaining)
Wiggum - Firewall (protector of the network)
Rodd - Primary DNS
Todd - Secondary DNS
Moe - FTP server
Itchy - Primary Mail
Scratchy - Secondary Mail
Soo..thats my new naming scheme..thanks to the peer pressure of
I'm soo jealous that you got your name as a login.
I want my johan! I've always been johan, but here someone beat me to it. grr.
Hey johan! yes, you with my login! I'll flame you for it. Or how about distributed rock-paper-scissors. Anything!
Johan
where i used to live we renamed all the machines in the cluster when their number changed
4 horsemen of the apocalypse
4 horsemen of the apocalypse + plague (we had both pestilence and plague)
7 deadly sins
I recently started with Babylon 5 names. ...
So far its just Garibaldi for my old
2-CPU Micron desktop system. Then I got
a new IBM ThinkPad to replace the desktop
box. Its small, its black, the *only*
logical name was
Bester
Dr. Frank J. Nagy Fermilab Computing Division Authentication and Directory Services Group
I suggest that you give machines real names with the A record
and also give them stupid corporate names with CNAME records.
Then, only tell your PHB about the corporate ones.
That way, if (s)he wants to think that a machine is named
solaris279f6c3, (s)he doesn't have to know that it is really
named bigdaddywarbucks.
It'll be our secret.
The two networks I manage get named after places from a couple of my pastimes, that being playing Battletech and reading Tolkein. So I get names like 'strana-mechty', 'twycross' and 'tukayyid' on one side, and 'rivendell', 'mordor' and 'minas-tirith' on the other.
.. and they all share their caches via NFS from a machine called 'farmer' ;)
A also like what a couple of people I work with di with the web proxy farm. We have cow, sheep, pig, donkey and horse
ram
flynn
yori
tron
And everyone's personal favorite:
mcp
I seem to recall UT used to name their VAX cluster after Dr. Who Companions...
I use the names of the ringbearers to name the boxes on my home network, so far galadriel and gandalf are functional and frodo I have been barred from touching by a parent who likes her work to be in the same place from one day to the next.
Elrond is under construction.
Computers, Linux, NetBSD,
Big Mac, Chulupa, Monster Burger, Whopper, etc.
EverCode
we have LARRY for a development web server, MOE serves up the finished sites. Our latest SQL server is SHEMP, and we haven't reused CURLY since that box died in the flames of faulty motherboard glory.
As for my workstation, I strayed from my typical dark, industrial music, goth sort of scheme and went for SUNSHINE. The next apache / shell box I brought up got SUNSET, and when I moved the cd recorder and scanner over to another machine, I had to name it SUNBURN just for the grimace when recognizing the horrible pun on people's faces as I burn a CD for them.
We've since been purchased by a much larger company, and our responsiblities now include setting up all of their servers. Hopefully we can maintain something more human-friendly than NTSVR_DNS_2_HOUSTON.
If you have a small network (under 20 machines or so), pick one theme and then some sort of naming convention under it. For example: Greek mythology, where monsters and heroes are workstations, and gods are servers. Within this, you can also say that a certain type of server (primary DNS controller, for example) must begin with a certain letter.
If you have a big network - the organization you work for is probably divided up into groups. Choose one theme for the servers, then choose seperate themes for each of the groups. (Or let them choose their own.) This is what the company I work for did - the group I'm in has all it's computers named after things have to do with beer. Ale, Hops, Lager, and Lite are all ours. Other groups have other naming conventions - there are machines named "PURCH##" (our purchasing dept. isn't too creative), machines named after cartoon characters (Stimpy, but no Ren...), etc. All the corporate servers are in the corp.xxx.com domain - troll.corp, otter.corp, barney.corp.
-Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
-- You are in a twisty maze of passages, all alike.
Unfortunately at work we use an unoriginal naming convention that yeilds swauh-data1 and smado_web1. So my naming inspiration is only released at home, where the server is Nova, the workstations are Pulsar, Nebula, and Dwarf, and they are all part of the workgroup Constellation. I know that Pricewatch.com uses Chess pieces for server names.
XeoMage
LongShlongDong But then the suits noticed and made us get rid of it :(
haha i guess you got a point there...when you scale /that/ much things get all pear shaped and rules change...
By home machines are named after cartoon dogs and their sidekicks.
My primary desktop(minitower) is Dogbert. The file and web server is Odie, and my old 486 box that I revitalised with Slakware (FULL SIZE Tower) is Marmaduke.
When I finally get around to getting a notebook, It'll be Snoopy.
My PalmIII is Woodstock, and my Newton (TGF Ebay) is Ratbert.
At work, IT demands and administers NT for most of the company. But here in the graphics department, we have out own subnet of Macs, SGIs and Linux boxen.
The Macs are named after various cartoom characters, starting with Pixar (Steve's other Job), then moving into Disnet at large (woody, buzzLightyear, hopper, flik, etc...).
The SGIs are various characters from CGI intensive movies and tv shows (terminator, t1000, tRex, starfury, dancingBaby, etc.)
The linux boxen are various british warships (Intrepid, Indefatigable, Invincible, Relentless, Trafalgar, arkRoyale, and Triumph).
The lone Sun workstation was recently renamed methesula(sp) as it holds the company's record for longest uptime.
The single NT box that IT insists we keep around, we have christined titanic. The MCSE twit thinks we're following the convention we had for the SGIs.... but we all know better.
john
Imagine all the people...
Marion is a man's name.
Marion Morrison.
AKA John Wayne
AKA The Duke
no sig please, I'm agnostic
How about countries that used to be in the old Soviet Bloc for firewalls? Of course, it would have to be explaned to people too young to remember when "Iron Curtain" used to be a regularly featured phrase on the nightly news.
:-)
You could use the names of the Great Lakes for gateway machines (think St. Lawrence Seaway). This has the extra bonus that you can name the biggest & beefiest of the lot "Superior"
You can also use county/parish names (boring, but there's lots of choices, so not much danger of running out).
Also, a note on long names -- at the school I did my grad work at, they aliased all computer names to their 3-letter prefix. So instead of typing "telnet bougainvillea" (the naming theme was desert plants, btw), you just type "telnet bou", and you're there.
-y, typing from Yosemite, which started out in the "Ship names from Star Trek" group, but also works in "national parks" and "Looney Tunes" categories.
np: Pretenders, "Pretenders"
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for slashdot.sig (129323052 bytes).
When I stepped in where I work now, all the HP machines were named VulcanX, where X is an ever-increasing integer. The mail server somehow got named male. (ooh... funny.) The lone Sun workstation was named after the company. A web-server was named NOC_WEB_SERVER.
I can say now that I have reversed that trend by deploying lots of machines named after Heinlein characters, William S. Burroughs characters (including Kiki, my favorite), and characters from the Sandman comics. (destiny, orpheus, delight)
I guess my bias for decent machine names came from college where I lot more creativity was usually employed in naming machines.
I think next I'll have to start using characters from what was my favorite marvel title (of which I have all but two or so issues): The New Mutants. Sunspot, Cannonball, Cypher, Warlock, Wolfsbane, Illyana. ./ away
On one side we've got jerry, elaine, kramer, newman, george, bubbleboy, yadayada.
On another side there's mario, pitfall, frogger, qbert, digdug.
this includes names like Gozer. Keymaster. zoul. etc.
One we're using is classic video games (we have tempest, digdug, pengo, qix.)
Another I wanted to do was cities animated series are set in. I've come up with Bedrock, Springfield, Quahog, Arlen, New New York, and then my brain shuts off.
In the past I've used heroes/gods of the forest, Dr. Seuss references, fantasy lands, and subatomic particles (when I was a physics grad student.)
-- Of course I'm paranoid. I'm a sysadmin.
I've taken on a pretty simple naming convention. Every time i setup another machine on my network, it gets a name attatched to some kind of emotion or reaction i've felt while working on it. :>
It leaves a somewhat disgruntled feel to the network, but at least the machines and I are at an equal understanding...
angstful
lobotomy
antipathy
paradox
stoopid
germany (my sparc, it's the designated fascist of the network)
narcolepsy (a laptop with a sleep-mode fetish)
takeitnasty (hah, the 'crash-me' machine i test stuff on)
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
Avoid antagonistic names...
appropriate names would be... names of killers
I love US culture.
We used to have many women characters names in our server room.. when problems happenned, you could get some really funny dialog going..
"Margaret's going down on me.. help!"
"Probe Lisa and see what she says."
"Lisa says she's fine. Finger Margaret's sql user."
"Looks good, but she's kind of slow to respond."
"Well, take her down, I'll blow her out later."
For my own boxes, I have always had names that have something to do with me (canadia is my desktop, as that was my nickname at school in the US at the time, and my laptop's name is cdlu). But a more common practice I have seen, is naming computers after characters in books the admins happen to be reading (for example, the person who named a server in my high school 'ishmael' was reading Moby Dick), or after historical figures (cartier), or simply the name of the person who gave us the computer (adam). Here in the college computer science club, we have a naming convention based on the non-sequuitor. Our newest (oldest--its a 486, but we just got it:)) box is called 'eh' while eddie, jolt and salem are also in use. We do have a Mac Classic 2 running our clock in the room, so it is the Macinclock, but that is more againts the theme...or lack thereof. :)
/etc/dictionary, and taking a random entry from it. :)
Though the best way of naming a boxb has to be hashing
OFTC: By the community, for the community
We also have an "Elvis", because thanks to Brother Skid - "Elvis is everywhere, man!"
At home I run Poltergiest (Dual boot Win98/Openlinux), Ghoul (486 server running Slackware), and Spirit (gf's machine, running 98 only). My old laptop is tenatively named "Banshee" (386 Primax laptop that only boots to floppy and is incredibly slow. That's satire, boy! Satire!)
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
TheGeek
http://www.geekrights.org
Kill the monkey
Well, the elegant useful MMX 200 is 'Gallifrey" The ugly tower is called "Skaro"... The little Mac LCIII is "Phlox" (don't ask why) and I think the Dreamcast (if they ever burn linux for it...) will be "Mondas" I love logging in to Skaro... "Exterminate!!!" alex@skaro :>
TV Soup is hosted on Masslinux's server terra.nebula.org. Every time I telnet on it says Welcome to terra. I always think "Good to be back, for a while."
We used names of body fluids... Blood, Urine, Lymph ,Sputum (my favorite)
pebcak-[0-9][0-9] and macluser[0-9][0-9], that is.
MST3K Characters, Spaceghost and other cartoon characters for clueful users (my department),
the masses get something else.
Currenly it's 'pebcak-[09][09]'. Previously I used 'macluser[09][09]' and 'leech[09][09]' until a few people started to catch on.
I worked down in Hawaii for a few months, and all the computers down there had Hawaiian names. A few notable ones:
malama - Hawaiian for "slave, servant" - this was for the main server
pa - "pearly shell" - my supervisor, a huge Perl fan, had this one
I had 'kahuna' for a couple of months. A friend of mine had 'hihi', which lead to much amusement whenever I tried to log on to his machine. "Just telnet to hihi, Brad."
Call them 'telnet', 'rlogin', 'telinit', 'ping', 'fdisk', 'format', 'rm', 'mkfs' etc. I guarantee you hours of fun typing commands like 'ping ping' or 'telnet rlogin'.
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
We've used words beginning in Sun for out Sun boxen. E.g. sunshine, sunburn, suntan, sunstroke etc. Another one we used for PC's was words beginning in Z (zygote, zounds, zebra, zoo etc.)
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
With all things related to computers, it's best to placate the powers that minimize uptimes. Our servers are named: Belial Belphegore Baal Abbadon Ravana Mephisto Pookah Toklosh The Judeo-christian focus is predominately a reflection of the current employees, rather than any kind of theological implication as to the severity of their evilness.
My personal machine is named Terrapin (and has been for a while).
I always alternate between Dead songs and famous British warriors/generals.
I have a 486 router (Cromwell) I've been planning on replacing with a P90 or such - I should rename it "Old_And_In_The_Way", or "OAITW", when I finally do get the newer one in here.
Other server ideas:
Morning_Dew (or MD) - Q3A Server
Hard_To_Handle - Server running Sendmail
Victim_Or_The_Crime - NT Server
Oh, just remembered - my previous P90 running FreeBSD was "Althea".
MK
Providing Thetan's(TM) safe-haven for over 18 years!
Brazil.
The X-Files of course. The members of the syndicate:
Smoking Man
Well Manicured Man
Deep Throat
First Elder
Mr X
You can imagine the trouble when a test machine in the States started broadcasting as Apollo which was the name of the main support server.
Also, the US group would have meetings for hours trying to decide on the name of a new server. When they decided on Challenger they discovered there was a mainframe with that name. The suits nearly got away with the compromise solution of mis-spelling challenger. Grrr
Who would believe in penguins,unless he had seen them? Conor O Brien - Across Three Oceans
"A cat has three names ..." goes a poem/song from Cats, and so do nodes on a network. A node has a proper name such as NTOABYM05 or MVSQA100, and a common name, such as nancy or sluggo. Finally, a node has a secret name, like 05:09:3f:57:60:22 or 198.162.27.33.
The problem with proper names is that once a node is named with a proper name, it cannot be unnamed or renamed without disturbing the cosmic whole. This means that proper names must be chosen with care so that they do not reveal too much about the node, in case that aspect of the node changes. MVSQA100 might signify that the node uses the MVS Operating System, is used for Quality Assurance work, and is the 100'th system in the network, but if that system is given over to the VM operating system, or is used for Development work, or is moved to a smaller network where it is the 15'th system, it's proper name now misnames it. However, since the proper name is the name that it's owners know it by, it must remain MVSQA100 even though it now should be VMDVLP15.
A node's common name is much friendlier, conveying nothing more than the individuality of the node. Should sluggo serve as a BSD webserver today and a Windows NT workstation tomorrow, sluggo still identifies the node properly. Still, great caution is necessary in selecting a common name for a node as the name must not conflict with either the spirit of it's surroundings or with the other participants in the network. Naming two nodes sluggo and sluggow would cause an imbalance in the ether, and perhaps overload one or both of the nodes with misrouted work. Similarly, naming a node sandra might cause unnecessary disturbances in the force if problems caused someone to say "sandra went down on me today" or "sandra's taking a dump". Verily, common names must be well thought out as well.
Lastly, we have secret names. These are names conferred on a node as an integral part of it's birthing, and for which the value is dictated by a higher power. We can say no more about secret names.
"values of beta will give rise to dom!"
Thinking of 5000 names could get a bit tiresome! However, I was wondering if you had perhaps investigated the possibility of using HINFO records within DNS?
Having the machine type and OS revs in a table like that is invaluable for network management, though I don't know if there are any network-management systems that even *use* the HINFO record. Could be a neat feature.
ObFavoriteNamingScheme: gizmo, widget, thingy, cog, sprocket, gadget and other "miscellaneous" descriptors.
--Mike
Piglet
:)
Winnie
Kanga
Tigger
Eeyore
I use those, Pretty neat huh?
//RaZ
I work at the National Gallery in London. We name after artists:
perugino
furini
seurat
giotto
ducio etc.
Added bonus: difficult enough to spell to deter crackers.
I enjoy using the computers that were named by fook and lunkwill from HHGTTG...
pondermatic (a slow SOlaris x86 box)
gargantubrain
omni-cognate
maximegalon
deepthought
earth
neutronwrangler
perspicutron
other HHGTTG
magrathea (my solaris development box)
prefect (the linux box - it is an alien here)
KK4SFV
I've always wanted to name servers after either the seven deadly sins or virtues. Pride, Avarice, Envy, Wrath, Lust, Gluttony, Sloth or Humility, Generosity, Love, Kindness, Self Control, Temperence, Zeal Lots of them fit good names for both inter and intranet file and/or web servers (Pride, Avarice, Generosity, Gluttony). A couple of good ones for firewalls (Wrath, Self Control). Backup could also fit (Gluttony, Sloth(tape backups)). The only downfall is the users would think all the servers were named Sloth. Paelon
If I ever setup a network, I've decided to name the boxen using the first names of Bond villians (only from the books.) They'd be easy to remember but not so obviously related to make me feel silly. Here at work all of our *NIX boxes are have generic dog names.
I'd much rather have Julius, Ernst, Hugo, etc.
------- Mark
This may not apply to everyone, but between high school and my last car three years ago I managed to go through 5 or so cheap used American-made cars...I have given machines these names in the past:
71impala
73caprice
80olds
81chrylser
85buick
83grandprix
67volvo
Of course, individual stations can be parts or stuff in the trunk.
I also have named machines based on different places where I stored real stuff, ie:
handbag
backpack
topdrawer
shoulderbag
filingcab
Go nuts! Just pick a theme and go for it.
Just set up a new server for some vanity domains a few weeks ago and named it frenchfries. Think my next theme will be fast food...
A lot of thinking went into this one...
/nutt
Servix
O, love it. The slight dash of daily perversion, with the name deserving enough for the only server (file, ipmasq, web) in my house lan.
Proudly running red hat 6.0 for 22 days straight now (its only been in the house for 25!)
My PowerMac G3 (as you can now figure, Servix is a netatalk server, too) is named NutSac -- i guess perversion keeps me sane...
For a development network we where testing our, we decided to go with
/HOUR/ and it couldn't even do that without crashing every 60 days or so.. hardly a leader!
MOE: WinNT Server
LARRY: Win98 Client
SHEMP: Linux Server
CURLY: Livingston PortMaster
AXIL: Axil Solaris Sever
PORTMASTER: Livingston Port Master
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME OR WORK!!!
We ran into alot of problems, like adding more than three machines was just plain awkwarded!
"So I don't remember a stooge called Axil" -- Tech support
"Uh yea, he was, UUUuuuum, huh, Uuuuuuuh in only one show that was never released to the general public"
"Is that so.... HHHHHHRRRRRRRRRrrmmmmmMMMM, that is funny, that MAKES you WONDER, HRRRMMM" - Tech suport
Well now that just ended in a bloddy....err uh I don't want to talk about it!!!
Second, we didn't think the names in the context of the network, See "MOE is there leader"in the stooges, but in this setting he was nothing more than a buggy SQL server, all MOE did was do a couple, like 2 or less DB trans an
SHEMP was an slower computer (Pent 75, 48 megs ram) and didn't a ton more work than the "Leader" and people would come in and say "HEH MOE! THE FEARLESS LEADER"
"MOMMY why is that computer not moving?!?!"
So that didn't work out at all....
This time we are going to start a naming convention based upon SUPER MODELS
"Hey man go FINGER CINDYif anyone is logged on to Cindy TELL THEM TO GET OFF , I need to HUP CINDY'S INET "
"A little later I am going to have JEN MOUNT CINDY'S FILE SYSTEM could you give me a hand with getting JEN'S FSCK TO WORK? before I even try anything"
I used characters from the Lion King where I used to work:
Mufasa
Simba
Nala
Rafiki
Timon
etc.
My machine at home, however, is named 'bitchass'.
"Gee, I don't know why all your email is coming to you in french!"
At the last company I worked for, we used the names of Philosophers for our servers. There's Aristotle, Plato, Zeno, and a new one (www4 right now, I'm fighting for it to be Ayn.. After Ayn Rand) But, this is a -huge- bank of names to draw upon. -Me
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
Marvin
Ford
Zaphod
Arthur
more to come, as soon as I get some more machines to add to my network. Granted this is for my home network of machines. For the intranet servers I help to admin at work, we use the names of cities in Georgia (where I am):
Atlanta
Savannah
Tifton
Roswell
You see how it goes. I personally think it is easier to remember a server's function if a creative naming convention is used. Since we have MANY clusters of different servers where I work, we use a different convention for each one. I may not be able to tell exactly what a particular server does by its name, but I can at least guess its general function (mail, news, web server, app, etc).
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
I use the Chinese Zodiac for my Cisco core routers.
We have Snake, Pig, Dog, Rat, Horse and Rabbit.
I don't think Cock will go over well when we get to 12th core router.
The network i was using this summer had machines named after 3 letter words:
zot
tow
...
My personal machines are named asmodean and lanfear (from Robert Jordan's wheel of time).. and i'll probably end up registering saidin.org one of these days..
i've also seen the hitchhiker's guide as a theme..
I know a company that uses planets/moons as their network theme (io, juiptar, terra, luna, europa, etc..)
one of the campus networks use alice in wonderland names (white-rabbit, cheshire-cat, alice...)
the general campus network uses cities, the cs cluster uses instruments..
a multimedia devel company i worked at during high school produced a story much like yours... the sysadmin there had named his computers something amusing (forgot exactly what).. the PR woman got pissy and decided to name the computers by function.. we ended up with (Sales 1, Sales 2, Marketing, Production, Production 1)...
i think in the main few people come up against naming issues (at least from upper management)..
i'm sure though that you can come up with something interesting that satisfies the anal helpdesk person.. =)
In the corporate world (of which I am a denizen), only safe and committee approved themes are ever officially sanctioned. The word professional has been co-opted to mean safe, traditional theme. You should sit in on a meeting to try and name a new system - Let's come up with a "flashy" acronym with boring meaning.
The only humor anyone ever "appreciates" is the the division head's.
I thought that I was clever when coming up with a name for my computer. While building it, my friends had taken to calling it 'The Machine' due to its decidedly industrial appearance. When the finished product was ready and it was time to pick a name, I thought about what sort of name would fit its preliminary moniker, and I decided to call my machine 'turing.' Turing... machine. Turing machine! haha, right?
(Try drinking heavily before reading this. It can't help but to make more sense that way.)
And so I wasn't that clever. Sue me.
-jay
The best names I ever saw for hosts was at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, which sported two firewalls named Fear and Loathing.
In my office, we have named our systems after cartoon characters -- Warner Brothers only! :)
Porky - RH Linux (of course)
Marvin - Windows NT4 (world domination factor)
Taz - 450MHz Alpha
Droopy - old Sun SPARCstation 5
Speedy - Sun UltraSPARC
Wiley - G3/400 blue-n-white Mac
I am a CS student at Middle TN State University and our campus's main hp-ux box (big box, server is definitely a more appropriate name...) is frank. I don't know where the name came from, but we all talk about frank with love and hate. We pitty him when it's time for hundreds of us to test sorts on millions of items. When the AI assignments start going we worry about him becoming self aware. Wouldn't bother us if his name was hpux.mtsu.edu or something like that.
;) )
We also have your linux boxes named after coders an mathematicians
we torvalds (of course
pascal
turing
lebowitz
etc.
The point is that it really eases the stress of coding and such if you feel like the computer you are using has certain human characteristics.
Ok frank, work with me, I often say. Wouldn't change it for anything!
I am the penguin that codes in the night.
we have Kyle, Mr Hand, Stan, a bloated file server named Cartman, BobBrady, Terrance, Phillip, the rest of the crew and an NT server appropriately named Kenny.
When I worked at Ohio State, we had about 15 file servers, each of which served 20 diskless clients in the student labs and faculty offices. Each server had a category name, and each client had a name that fell into that category. For instance, for most of my time there, my machine was styracosaur, served by dinosaur. A good naming convention allows this type of grouping, which is what NTPA gives you now.
The "NTPA01" scheme has its own problems. If there are only a few machines per state and OS, it's tolerable; however, if you need to be able to track down something on a particular machine, and you have NTPA01 - NTPA20, you'll have problems. Not to mention that many people have difficulty remembering the two-letter state abbreviations (especially the M* ones).
And, as someone else mentioned, the more mnemonic the server name, the easier it is to work with; if the NT01 server is always the primary DNS, consider NT-DNS....
R David Francis
R David Francis
Off the top of my head:
:-)
Big Bird
Elmo
Oscar
Grover
Cookie Monster
Baby Bear
Snuffleufagus
Kermit
Telly
Guy Smiley
Of course, I have a 2 year old and am currently wearing a Tinky Winky (Teletubbies) costume
We use astronaut names for most of our servers.
;)
It got a little trickier when we ran out of moon-walkers, but NASA's site has crew listings for all their missions online, so there are lots of choices.
It got funny when we installed a Solaris box and named it Laika, after the dog the Soviets put up. Dunno, I thought it was funny
You could start with the typical web hosting company
naming convention:
name your first machine WOPR like in the movie,
then start with simpsons (bart, lisa, maggie, marge, mo, homer, etc), then south park..
i've worked @ 4 hosting companies, they all did
it the same way for some reason.
"And how can this be? For he is the
I use railroad terms for mine. It adds a flavor that most can not recognize, and tracing packets from Reading to Wabash sure is fun. Also, names like Tehachapi make for friends telneting in and trying to get on a little tough since no one can remember how to spell it... Names like Johnson and Lube have also made for fun telneting experiences....
Wheeeee
We just used the system of whoever used the computers named them. Usually two editors would work on one computer, so the name for the computer they used would often have some sort of relation to them, or most likely their nicknames. One girl who loved polyester named hers Polyfreak, for instance.
I wanted to name our printer The Millenium Falcon, but I never got around to it. (Like the Falcon's warp drive, the damned thing never worked when we really needed it--like, say, midnight the night before a publication date).
What did I name my computer? If you've ever worked with PageMaker (a very memory intensive program) on aging Macs on a network, you'll get this: Crash.
bah.. how many of u actually watched Neon Genesis Evangelion? WE need a magi cluster for /.! Balthasar, Melchior, and Casper!!!!! -neal...
The only convention we have around here is that there needs to be either a little plastic figurine, or a stuffed animal sitting atop the machine to match the name.
For example, yoda has a little rubber Yoda sitting above it. Eeyore has an Eeyore beanie-baby like thingus sitting on it's monitor.
Currently there's one exception, but it will be remedied shortly. We were trying to figure out a name for my new box, and ended up naming it Al (I said "what shall we call it", my wife sort of sang "call it Al"). Since we aren't about to rename one of the other boxes to Eddie, I guess I'll have to rename Al (probably will become Tick, or Chairface, since I've got those bendable rubber figures sitting on it already)
Del
I used up all the "Seven Dwarves", and now I'm working my way through Tolkiens 4(5) book series...Bilbo, Frodo, Merry, Pippin, Gandalf, Balrog, Bombadil, Smaug, Strider, Sauron, Gimli, Legolas, Elrond, Galadriel, the list goes on and on.
oh..and whats the name of oscar's little pet worm? huh smart guy? :)
I was surprised to see this as the first post/response, at it is similar to the naming scheme I used for my lil' home network:
NT Server: Stalin (Unstable, imposing, dangerous to work with)
Linux box: Kruschev (because Linux "will bury you")
Win98: Gorby (friendly, accessable, and in the end ineffective)
NeXT (Black Hardware): Lenin (the intellectual!)
Vaxstation 3100/VMS: He's not on the network yet...any ideas for this one?
-----------------
coldwar@pobox.com
-----------------
But then, I guess when you've got over 1600 servers, you have to do something.
How can the eyes be the Windows of the soul when they never blue screen?
Hrmmm...
Welcome to Linux 2.0.34.
darkstar login: zantispam
Password:
Linux 2.0.34.
Last login: Thur Oct 28 19:33:55 on tty4.
No Mail.
Insanity is considered grounds for divorce, though by the very same grounds it is the shortest route to marriage.
-- William Mizner
darkstar:~$
censorship is a form of noise, which actively seeks to drown out content with silence - Crash Culligan
...but I guess having your computers named after famous machines is nice and easy to remember.
:)
I.e. isn't it obviuos that your life depends on the good behaviour of Wintermute and hal9000 (the latter one is my main NT box; It's hard to control sometimes) while holly is a funny little lebook that changes its gender (95/Linux) many times a day?
If I had a three-rooms-wide Cray I'd probably name it "Eniac"
I name all my computers related to ants. AntFarm150MMX, AntFarm P2, The Colony, etc. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Use extended ASCII: Its there, you paid for it, use it
If the OS supports it, use spaces: We use spaces when we write, why not in server names
For NT: Use the SID, it will help you remember it
Make proper use of resources: If your system supports 255 character names, use them
Misspell words: Wats soo goood bout spppellng?
Use password generators to help find good names: A good name is a random name
If possible: Include a new line or backspace character code in the server name (this helps find bugs in software)
I named the computers on the network I set up in my highschool in '95 after He-man characters. Skeletor was the server, with Man-At-Arms, Mossman, She-ra, and the rest of the gang as workstations. I was shocked that anybody else remembered but everyone thought it was hilarious.
My 486 at home is called Whore and my new Athlon is called SweetBaby.
"Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality." -- Dalai Lama
for those of us stuck in deity-name-land, pantheon.org has some good stuff... no sumerian, though. :P
the main Internet/mail server @ your local college is running Novell and named Achilles? Bad mojo, methinks. It's down, like, once a week for a day @ a time! It has nothing to do with the face I have root on it......^_^
Wanted: A Bauhaus reformation of society.
At the ISP/Computer consultant firm I work the machine were originally named after boats that sank. We grew bigger and it was just boats. We grew bigger and now it's just about anything, but a number of those you mentioned are represented. And they're on pretty important positions too ;)
May we live long and die out
You're naming your Macintoshes after the founders of Microsoft?
hmmm....
I usually give my computer names from William Gibson books. My main computer is Nueromancer and my Internet gateway is Wintermute. Laptop is Count Zero, other one is Chevette. My new Mac will be Laney.
At work we have two networks. One is Simpsons-related and the other is Disney.
-------------------------------------------------
Extra bonus reward: this also helps sysadmin geeks feel even smugger for sharing the secret knowledge that "mail" round-robins among wart, boil, ulcer, and bubo, or whatever.
Name: RADAGAST.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.185
Name: GLAURUNG.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.189
Name: SARUMAN.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.190
Name: SAURON.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.192
Name: SMEAGOL.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.193
Name: GOLLUM.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.194
Name: BALROG.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.195
Name: SHELOB.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.196
Name: GRISHNAKH.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.197
Name: UGLUK.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.198
Name: MORMEGIL.CIT.CORNELL.EDU
Address: 128.253.242.199
Chorizo
I go to WPI. Those funny names are still there. I love it - you know exactly what room to go to. Honda.wpi.edu? The car lab! (AK 120d)
--
Oak - the big production computer
Spruce - the smaller utility box
Acorn - the laptop
Simple, easy to remember!
--
zarquon - workstation
bistromath - nis/mail server
trillian - workstation @work
magrathea - vpn server
random boxen:
slartibartfast, aneurysm, refractor, gutenberg,
damogran, etc
This, coming from a guy named "Joe."
:)
::: jane
I've always liked names that fit with the domain name best for some reason.
like calamity.jane.org for my box at home.
::: jane
If it needs to be consistant then just dig up a mythology book, or hit the web. (I personally like http://www.pantheon.org/mythica/) I have a site based all around the story of Daedalus, if you spend a little time it can even make a bit of sense. King Minos and Queen Pasiphae for your PDC & BDC. Labyrinth for your firewall. Icarus for a departmental server (I don't like that department much). One recomendation, avoid using names from religions that are still practiced. People are really easy to piss off. I can just see a lawsuit because Brahma is the PDC not Jesus.
Why not just go for names of the women from 'Coronation Street' (a particularly 'interesting' UK soap)
eg
Vera (firewall)
Mavis (NT)
Rita (Linux)
and a whole bunch of other stuff
This article should be higher up in the HOF, or at least topping all the JonKatz `news for nerds' articles.
Sorry if this is flamebait, I just don't care about karma today.
--
E2 IN2 IE?
$ whois mindspring.com
...
ITCHY.MINDSPRING.NET 207.69.200.210
SCRATCHY.MINDSPRING.NET 207.69.200.211
I had a PHB who decided to b!tch every time a new system got a name he didn't like, saying things like "How do I know what this thing does without a descriptive name?". The truth of the matter is that he didn't *need* to know, because he'd never deal with the system directly by that name.
Several times, I was tempted to change the name of the zone file in named.conf, and set up a cron job to regularly change the serial on the original (now a dummy) file, but getting snitched out seemed too likely.
Perhaps I'll leave this suggestion here for anyone else whose supervisor has just as little imagination as my ex-boss -- someone brought up Soviet leaders already, so I need not go further down that road...
--
E2 IN2 IE?
I stumbled onto this awhile ago while loudly bemoaning the fact that someone other than me had taken this prize domain name real-estate. About as minimalist as a site can get, but he's apparently run into the same problem we have.
Check out this list of name groups.
Just like James Burke's Connections column in Scientific American
There seems to be a trend expressed here towards giving boxen names based on their personality...
/. would name their machines something like this:
I think if we adopted the Bard's names (plenty of scope... 37 plays) most of
NT: Iago, Claudius, Antonio, LadyMacbeth...
Linux: Prospero, Viola, Rosalind
DOS machines: Caliban
I'm not sure what would suit the comic characters, eg Trinculo, maybe Win95? How about the tragic heros, Hamlet, Othello, Lear et al?
And there are lots and lots of minor characters to suit the quirks of each box.
tiger, puma, shark, lynx, armadillo.
and ofcourse cow and chicken.
thinice, acid, to, cloud9, therag,
pinsandneedles, top, tology
& for punsters
derneath, toward, becoming,
How's that hard drive on becoming? Oh.
I'm a programmer/analyst working for a medical program dealing with reproductive health. Most of our machines currently have boring names. I'm trying to get all the machines named after procedures and/or sexually transmitted disease...so far my two boxen are named PapSmear and Colposcopy(believe me...you don't want to know!!).
Tubal, Herpes and TheClap will be coming online over the next year.
_________
Sometimes, when I'm feelin' bored, I like to take a necrotic equine and assault it physically.
_________
Sometimes, when I'm feelin' bored, I like to take a necrotic equine and assault it physically.
we just name ours after lord of the ring characters, but personally i have my own "Mallats"(tm) scheme, with Brodie, and so forth, Svenning is next to come!
"Creeping up into the sky. Stopping, at the top and, starting down. The girl grabbed my hand, I clutched it tight.
I got dibs on "Platypus." And no network is complete without a "wombat."
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I'm sure you can find lots of good material in there (I got dibs on "Nipple")
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I started a naming convention in my office of RHPS characters brad janet riffraff magenta frank so far. Waiting for more to use frank, ralph, betty, and colombia.
At our institute we have lotza 'puters clustered in subgroups and I think that the naming conventions our sysadmins use are silly but effective. For example, without going into Dutch geography, one group is named after rivers in the Netherlands. The larger the river the more powerfull the machine that is named after it, with the central servers having names like the IJssel and the Rijn (you know the Rhine don't you?) Another group uses the periodic table with the servers named after the first elements Hydrogen and Helium.
;-p
Although not entirely consistent it works fairly well. I know intuitively which machine to hit for that extreme resource slurping process.
One problem is that al our foreign scientists (about 30% of the institute is non Dutch) are in the dark, since they dont know any of the Dutch rivers.
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
We went for the heavenly bodies: Luna Atlas Mars Pluto
I have a big bag full of two cents and I'm coming your way.
at my office everything is named after talk show hosts. my machine is Oprah. Springer, Sally, Montel, it goes on. i didnt even know there were so many talk shows before i started working there... :) of course the real important machines all get greek god naming... which is pretty standard..
//Insert Meaningfull Quote Here
Can't get to view the comments right now, so I hope this isn't a duplicate post...
I ran into need for names for ~25 systems a couple of years ago, and settled on naturally-occurring human-fatal toxins. Sorted them alphabetically, and came up with about 20, had to jump to Princess Bride for one that started with an 'I' ("What you do not smell is Iocaine powder..."), could have had quite a few more, but requirement was first letter of each had to be unique.
It was fun hearing the techs call out "Belladonna died again" or "Hemlock is alive" across the lab.
--The Wandering Bard--
I was in Cornwall for the recent total eclipse of the sun, staying with my parents, and it was while I was there that I decided to take the Linux plunge...
:-)
In honour of these two great events, I resolved that the first box I bought would be honoured with the name of "eclipse". Sure enough, a couple of weeks later I bought a crusty old 486, installed Debian, and eclipse was up and running.
It wasn't until a month later that I noticed what name was embossed by the manufacturer on the little square badge on the left of the case... "Eclipse".
I shat my pants.
-Andy
http://www.gimbo.org.uk/
I work for a very, very large Christian company, and we name all servers and networked peripherals after bible names. You would be surprised how many there are! And it is pretty interesting stuff too, but the names get a little vague. For example my workstation runs on Habakkuk, which runs on Abimelech, which networks to the printer Nebuchadnezzar. (I am not making this up!) Oh, and by the way, I prefer the user name God.
raretshirts.com - cool vintage t-shirts
I heard of a company in London that used the stations on the Circle Line (underground rail) for a part of their network. Another one was a place where they had to set up 52 workstations. The engineers went out and bought a pack of 52 coloured crayons and used the colours as names. Yet another one is to get one of those books with (currently) popular names for your yet-to-be-born kid. Like hurricanes, you could alternate between male and female. You could also completely go that route: there are plenty of named storms already and every year produces new ones. Personally, I use the capitals of US states. That'll keep my home network supplied for a while.
I found your article on Slashdot interesting... I too am in the same situation. I've named servers in an entire server farm Looney Tunes names, Star Trek names and even names of Anime characters from the Urotsukidoji series. One thing that I did was look at the temperment of the servers to name them. The server that always crashed (mail server) was named Kenny from South Park. hehehe
---
IMHO, of course.
May the SOURCE be with you.
Where I worked, they had an NT network. .reg file which enabled regedit... I changed my hostname a.s.a.p. to "orkysoft". That made it much easier to play games over the network. Also, we were not allowed to email to outside of the company. There was a sample program supplied with the IDE we used to program our stuff (i.e. games), which was a simple email client. There was a server, probably running some flavour of UN*X, running something on port 25. Do the maths...
;-)
"My computer" had a hostname consisting of one character depicting the city in which it was located, and six hex bytes which represented the mac address of the nic in it. After a while, one of my colleagues sent me a
This company (which I will not name) actually guards sensitive data. Using a 99% M$ solution.
I don't work there anymore, naturally
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Just substitute the "ftp://ftp" part with ;-)
"http://www". The guy just wanted to show off
I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
Capone (DNS)
Gotti (intranet server)
Luciano
Siegel
Soprano (love the tv show)
Gambino
Corleone
and postions: godfather (datawarehouse server - sounds great when we have problems with it, - "the godfather isn't happy today"
lieutenant (PDC server)
capo (BDC server)
solider
That which does not kill you, makes you stronger.
Names are easy to remember, 'specially if everyone already knows them. For instance, my little subnet uses:
The scientist names are easy to remember, professional-sounding, and a neat tribute to those who have come before.
If i get any more comps i'll try
That newton guy is on his own. :-)
Tetris rules.
Probably the most fun I've had in server naming was at a previous job. We used The Inferno as the convention, and named according to sin. It allowed us a pretty natural matrix to categorize services and still left plenty of room for expansion/reassignment. The fun part - it was an NT network. 'Greed, avarice, gluttony, etc...'
I work in the technology division of a computer information service. Our original server names were not very exciting, east for the east coast, and central for the west). As time went by, we got some pretty interesting ones, including Zeus, Ophelia, Cyanide, lithium, beverage, iron, Strife, Elm (trees seem to be thought of as professional), Oscar, and Elmo.
I work in the very relaxed department, where there are not many restrictions, because our headquarters is in California, so our computer names were whatever we wanted them to be. On the other coast, they had to use a stupid naming convention: [user_name][operating_system][random_number], which I think is very boring.
--- Joe Seghatoleslami | joe@cranbury.org
How many thousands of you (other than myself) have had a server named "Hal"?
Simpson characters.
X-Files characters.
Porn Stars.
Precious metals, stones, and int'l currency.
Planets from StarWars.
StarTrek Characters.
...I'm really hoping to add Pokemon to this list soon, since there are 150 of them we won't run out of names anytime soon.
When I worked for a large DB tool company, our CA office had zoo animals and the MO office had farm animals. When I worked for a military contractor, it was Civil War generals. Where I am now has ie KCNTMAIL01. BORING!!!!
Americanc non Sequitur Society: We Don't Make Sense, But We Do Like Pizza.
Themes: 1. Names from "Lord of the Rings" or "The Poetic Edda" 2. Norse/Roman/Greek gods 3. Diseases (two of mine are dementia and sanity) 4. Family/Class/Plylum (one is named rodent) 5. Ships (servers are aricraft cattiers, NT machines are destroyers, printers are navel missles, etc) 6. any other large group or list (food??)
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
A CNAME record in the DNS should keep them happy...:
boringname CNAME cyclops
and they need never know...
-duncanAt my current position, I work for a geotechnical company - so all the servers are named after rocks... Granite is the primary server, basalt, felspar, dolomite, etc... Using names that are known in our industry helps... The users don't need to know what server is doing email, web, database, etc... I prefer transparent networks, so the users don't get in a knot on where to find things... I name printers after trees simply because they are spitting out dead cousins..... Workstations are named after their primary user, use or location.... I even go as far having logical drive mappings - U:\ for users, T:\ transfer, P:\ applications, etc. It's all the same in the different offices... Since some employees work in multiple offices, they don't have to learn a new network topology...
If you're interested, I wrote a few years back a Netware Directory Service Suggested Naming Standards for NDS objects.... NDS Naming Guidelines
Maybe worthwhile, YMMV...
.mark
Remove the '_nospam' from my email address....
... named GOD, the logical names for my PDC and BDCs are:
..
Indoctrination,
Morals,
Control,
Ignorance.
You see, when they all go down..
then
God is Dead.
I'm sorry. That was awful.
Then again - it relieves the monotony of my day..
Just don't get me started on my Nietzsche domain...
Zarathustra, Friedrich, and so on...
Although, I do have a friend who names all his servers after metal band members.
It's hard to keep a straight face when you're fiddling around with the insides of M_Manson.
--Nick
GothTartUK
That's right. I've begun naming the machines in my network after pokemon. There's 151 of 'em so I'm not gonna run out anytime soon. So far I've got Pikachu - PDC Riachu - BDC and SQL server Porygon - File Server Graveler - my workstation Rattata - my laptop Vulpix - firewall (those of you who know pokemon know why) I used to work for an isp that named all their machines after fish. most boring naming convention I've ever seen. I ended up naming my machine hogsucker..just cause I think naming them after fish is kind of lame.
So far I've got
Pikachu - PDC
Riachu - BDC and SQL server
Porygon - File Server
Graveler - my workstation
Rattata - my laptop
Vulpix - firewall (those of you who know pokemon know why)
I used to work for an isp that named all their machines after fish. most boring naming convention I've ever seen. I ended up naming my machine hogsucker..just cause I think naming them after fish is kind of lame.At my last job we used as a theme: Names of small towns in virginia. We had a map on the way of the state and called it our random name generator. With Virginia (as most states) you get some cool names: bumpass, wachapregue, schyler.
The last place I worked at was a pretty small shop. We named a couple of the machines after South Park characters based on what they did. Chef served up the mail. Cartman was the big fat production server. Kyle didnt really do anything but puke once in a while. Kenny was the test/development server. (Oh my God, you killed Kenny! You Bastard!)
At my old university they called the main cluster of (I think) SPARC's "unix". Thus causing much confusion among students, who now all think that unix is a text based email program for NT (the only use for the cluster is telnetting to it from NT boxes and using Elm) or seemingly just a synonym for email.
I would suggest that this naming scheme should use names which are easy to type and remember rather than ones which are repetitive and formal. "srv001" through "srv999" might look nice and orderly, but in fact is much harder to remember and type than "rivers" or "cartoon characters" or "80's arcade games".
we got that problem here. servers have creative names, but workstations are "mscpc01"..."mscpc99". We actually print out names of Star Wars planets and tape them to the monitors of computers in the lab. Makes it even more confusing when you have to ask "What pc number is Dosha? I need to ping it..."
Thank god the servers are mostly named for fairy tales (robin-hood,little-john,charlotte) but even that is being set aside for strict functional names (we just added ftp and www, although ftp mainly gets used for ssh access from outside our firewall, and web pages are also served from charlotte, ljohn, rhood and mscpcweb. ack.)
I have named by Compaq Alpha servers after Pittsburgh athletes that are in their respective hall of fames: wagner stargell clemente bradshaw greene lemieux lambert ham etc.
-----------------------------------
"I have as much authority as the pope, I just
don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin
Call it Sexist, but we have started naming the servers in our office after the women that work here, just so we can say.. "Becky is going down..." . And before everyone starts flaming me, the first box named in this way was named after my wife...
Hi!
I installed a set of printers in a client's office in Tokyo, and named them after Disney characters. The Japanese staff simply couldn't believe that their printers were named Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, and Louie. I went to Tokyo Disneyland that weekend, bought little dolls, and attached them to each printer with Velcro. The office ladies loved the idea--and conspired to never explain to the president (ancient, honorable Japanese stuffed shirt) how the printers were named.
We name both servers and machines here. Servers are named for Canadian provinces, machines are named for U.S. states (ideally the state where the user was born). The PDC is BC, the secondary domain controller is AB, etc. User machines are MA, GA, PA, NY, NJ, etc. We can refer to machines by meaningful names, but we don't have to type long strings.
The only problem with naming servers after Canadian provinces is that some of the staff are, um, geographically challenged. Not that any of us are heroes--we're still wondering what the postal abbreviation for Nunavit is. (Anybody know? We got a couple of new boxes coming, and it'd make things interesting.)
The names used at the prestigious engineering school in downtown Atlanta are quite creative. At least the main servers that students use for just about everything:
acmex
acmey
acmez
You'd think that a school of computer geeks could have come up with something more creative.
What about car names for servers? Nothing beats logging into 300ZXTT, or SupraTT, 911Carrera, etc. ^_^
Dunno. It seems that Brezhnev would be a good name. Or possibly Bukharin. Old-guard, radical yet conservative, and killed by Stalin (the NT machine).
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Leonid is my Mac. The long-lasting stagnating (Apple) machine.
Konstantin (Cherenko) is the sickly Apollo.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
I know this article is going to get flooded with "My servers are named..." but here's a good rule of thumb in a corporate setting. If you want to get sympathy points with users use cute names. For example, I have mine based on Seseme Street characters. So when a server, Linux, Netware, NT, or what have you you can say "Oh Elmo's sick today, why don't you send him a get well card from Blue Mountain?" and set up a e-mail account for Elmo that forwards it to the admin in charge of that system. Believe it or not it has worked over here, I have Linux, OS/2, WinNT, and Novell Servers and while our NT machine reboots Oscar's (the Grouch) mail gets quite a few cards (Heh heh).
Also another suggestion mentioned from the techncian next to me, call one backup server "hell". So if someone asks for more CPU cycles tell them to go to hell!
"Superman had Kryptonite, I have NT. Life is real." - Unknown
Eric Carlson MIS Director Midstate Manufacturing
Wow! What a great idea! What I wouldn't give to login to an Althea or a Bertha. I'd name that scrappy computer WharfRat!
The powers that be wanted to change the names to sgi[1-n] or somesuch. Other clusters, from sea creatures to birds to cartoon characters, were also at risk.
I argued that the admin staff could remember that whale had a bad hard drive and that grouse's monitor was in for repair and that wilma was crashing intermittently, but that a numbering scheme would obfuscate the individual mnemonics for those machines.
The decision makers were convinced that we could better do our jobs within a human friendly naming scheme. Tragedy narrowly averted. :)
My machines of course are: Gandalf, Celeborn, Frodo, Bilbo, and Merry. My boss names his machines after one of the 12 apostles.
We use a biblical naming convention (even though the majority of us are athiests or agnostics). Names that reflect the type of service offered if possible, but foremost names that are neat at first glance but looking deeper at the actual meaning of the name have a dark side. For example: Babel - mail server. Of course we all know about the Tower of Babel Famine, Plague, Death, War - Clustered web servers. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse others: eden abel eve adam cain gozan goliath aegis -- omeganon
Omeganon
or...No Thanks, Not Today, Nice Try....you get the idea.
you could name your machines after various governments, your unix boxes could be named democracies, novell boxes get something like monarchies, etc.....
just think you could name your NT boxes after Italian governments (unstable and you never run out of names)
Well, lets see:
Dragon - big, fast and lots of hot air coming out of it...
Clockwork - Laptop with a large "Clockwork Orange" sticker on it.
Anti - Well, it is a bit anti and sometimes stops without explanation or warning...
Flashlight - Is turned on and off frequently.
Alchemist - It turns light into pictures. =) (webcam)
Demomania - Used mainly to watch demos.
Well... It works for me...
/.Mattsson - My native language is not English, so please don't whine over linguistic errors. (That's lame anyway...)
The school that i just graduated used Benedictine Monastaries for the names of all their UNIX boxes... Melk, Bingen, Ottmar, Ottoburen, dzog... A quick search will most likey yield lots of names.
The school newspaper (i was the admin) had the names of different burritos from the local Bravo Burrito... fiesta was one of them. I cant remmeber the rest, it was just an example that may spark your mind.
The school's network used the different ships from StarTrek.
Im working on naming my own server. It has to be something cool, i will never name my server wwwsrv01 or something like that!
I name all of the computers on my network acording to what they do. I have one server that does it all.. Its name is 'God'. Its cool to say "You can't login, can you ping god?" or "God is going down for a hard drive swap." My primary computer is named after my old bbs handle 'interrupt 13' and my laptop is called 'mini me'. It just makes thing more fun!
At the shop where we have a few servers and a handful of workstations, we have always used creative names for them, and will continue to (because I make the descision darnit!!) Some of the notable names include Phoenix for a server that was resurrected from a terribe hard drive crash that had us down for a week reconstructing data from our shoddy backups (oops, learned that one the hard way, raid baby!) and ShitBoxFromHell for a workstation that has given us hell for a year straight. That name is acutally now reserved for any machine that fits this bill, and may be inherited by a new workstation that refuses to cooperate... Just an interesting note...
Learn how a CPU works before you learn to program. Seriously.
domain = Cybertron PDC = Optimus_Prime firewall = Grimlock mail server = Blaster Gateway = space_bridge or Sky_Lynx experimental machine = Wheeljack network monitor = Perceptor alpha workstation = Alpha_Trion 3d gaming rig = Power_Glide solaris server = Sun_Streaker netware 2 server = Kup windows workstation = Wreck-Gar (the Junkion) port scanner = Prowl file server = Teletran1 there are many more, I didn't even include the decepticons. ravenmoon
I worked in a shop which had had two different people responsible for the workstation names. One of them had used (professional sounding yet cool) pistol names. The other had used names of characters from the Green Acres TV show. It got, well, really odd. My boss had "Haney", which (AFAI can recall) was across the hall from "Mauser". I think we had one called "Glock" as well, which may still be next door to "Ziffle." Go figure.... Nick
as assistant sysadmin at foreman.fu.bar, i was once given the somewhat conspicuous honor of naming five new machines.
i had to go with the obvious choices:
george.foreman.fu.bar
george.foreman.fu.bar
george.foreman.fu.bar
george.foreman.fu.bar
and,
george.foreman.fu.bar
... well, _i_ thought it was funny...
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
that's easier than
uh...
something really, really easy...
oh, and i can't believe these guys used _search_engines_ !!!???
"Whoa." - Keanu Reeves, from EVERY SINGLE MOVIE HE HAS EVER BEEN IN!!!!!!!
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
"Cogito ergo es... I think, therefore you is." -The King of the Moon's Head,
For me, when given the task of naming the machine that had the CD-R drive attached to it DISCO_INFERNO was a natural choice. After all, what does it do but BURN DISCS. One of my bosses didn't happen to agree, but the name has stuck.
------
WWhhaatt ddooeess dduupplleexx mmeeaann??
This sig intentionally left justified.
I don't have any control of server names at work, but at home, I have named my computers after characters and settings in the book The Neverending Story. My main computer is named Perilin, and my LAN's gateway to the Internet is named Sphynx.
My roommate, however, doesn't want to follow that convention. His computer is named "sexmachine"...
-Darren
- Gates
- Jobs
- Ellison
- Metcalfe
etc., etc...We had Borg and McEnroe at UNC; nowadays Sampras, Agassi, Williams, Hingis, et al could be used...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
NT = No Text. Why are you reading this?
-----
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
The real meaning of the GNU GPL:
"The Source will be with you... Always."
When was the last time you sat through a Linux boot and upon execution of "scandisk" were required to hit "Fix" fourty-one-thousand and three times because the UI designers decided it would be too hard to add a "Fix All" button? e2fsck -p, my friend.
Be fair. (It's good for credibility.) Any time there's a semi-serious problem, you're gonna be hitting y for quite a while w/ fsck.
I've lost entire file systems more than a few times because of an unscheduled reboot, incidentally. The same has happened, incidentally, w/ NTFS, but never, ever, ever with FAT/FAT32.
It's actually enough that there's a semi-decent chance I'll make my MP3 partition a Fat32 one.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
P.S. Don't tell me Solaris is any better; it made some noises significantly scarier than "extra bytes discovered" when I recently bungled a shutdown.
That's like saying that cars these days have gotten quite good at protecting their drivers from fatal crashes. The statement may be true, but that sort of thing should still NEVER happen. It is to be avoided at almost all costs.
No. You don't understand.
If you slam the power button on a FAT/FAT32 box, you're not gonna lose the partition.
You can't say the same for a Linux box using ext2, or even a Solaris box using UFS. From *VERY PAINFUL PERSONAL EXPERIENCE*, you have quite a decent chance of damaging some serious stuff, and way more than an unheard of possibility of just completely losing the filesystem.
FAT/FAT32 can recover from random reboots without a problem. It's simple enough to just not have the same kind of problems as Linux w/ ext2.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Names like Hindenberg, Titanic, Andrea Doria, Valdez, Challenger should be reserved for Windows machines.
In all fairness, Windows has gotten quite good at handling random reboots.
This is not a strong area of ext2, to say the least.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Naming objects after something or someone is a time honored human tradition, enjoyed by cathedrals(Saints), weapons of war, and federal buildings.
Descriptive (as opposed to family class) Numbers belong in IPs, not in the names. Management which attempts to look professional by forcing mnemonics out of names is merely making their staff less efficient; humans are shockingly efficient at handling large numbers of names.
We're not that good at identifying objects by number, unless those numbers are drastically inconsistent(thus, the low number of phone numbers we know that are almost identical).
Myth, Literature, Movies, Movie Genres, Computer Components, Biology(I'm itching to have a Mitochondrial web cluster), Famous Wars, Famous Scientists, Tremendous Disasters(Hindenberg just went up in flames), Great Treaties(Versailles is looking OK for now...but I have a feeling it might fall apart), etc.
Humor is always good, but mainly when its subtle. That way, there's always plausable deniability.
Yours Truly,
Dan Kaminsky
DoxPara Research
http://www.doxpara.com
Marion - Celeron 400 RH 6.0
:)
Jane - Mac Duo 230
Edith - Cyrix MII 300 Caldera 2.2
Molly - Celeron 366 Win95
Don't know why, but these name entertain me.
Prolly need a hazel and martha too.
At home, I generally use Seinfeld names (my Linux server's always been Kramer, my wife's iMac is Elaine, my old 7200 is Jerry, and my Win98 PC is George - the lovable loser that he is). My iBook is named toiletseat, and my old PowerBook 3400 is named Beanie, for the propellerhead hat icon I used for the hard drive. My Mandrake workstation is named Bushwood, the country club from Caddyshack (my all-time favorite film, since I love low comedy and play a lot of golf).
At my old company, the servers had boring names, but the shares were all with a different theme for each server. We had Ren & Stimpy, the Simpsons, the Brady Bunch, and the Beatles (after the first four, we moved on to Beatle wives, first wives, Pete Best, and Stu Sutcliffe). We use boring names at the place I work now (don't blame me - we were using the scheme when I got here). We just name the server for it's task (Company-Mail, Company-Production, Company-File, etc).
Another thing at my old company - I had one of the cool (at the time) Mac Quadra 840AV systems, with the DSP chip for video and audio processing. Then I needed to give it up for our color department, but I kept the drive and put it in a slower Mac. The Mac was renamed Helen Keller, since it was both blind and deaf. From then until the day I left, That remained the name of whatever Mac I used.
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
A boring way of naming serverfs, but an effective one, is to name them after geographical features. Here at Elsevier (my current employer) servers are named after mountains, workstations after smaller features. My two machines are named after small rivers ...
Chris Wareham
Sun hardware often has wacky codenames - my favourites being the `Happy Meal' and `Big Mac' ethernet cards.
Chris Wareham
> and it's in iambic pentameter.
:-)
Actually, it's not. Right after I originally wrote it, and it was published, a correspondent explained to me that the meter it _is_ in is called 'anapestic tetrameter'.
I just liked the joke.
Cheers,
- PS/2 Model 80 - behemoth
- PS/2 E - stripe (because of the green stripe running round the outside)
(I also have a machine named grotto, for similar but obscure reasons.) But most PCs these days don't look as distinctive - and you will probably have many looking the same.Hmm, darkstar, that was the default hostname that Slackware chose for you, back when I used it. Is it still the same now?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
1. a boss at a company I know likes naming them after Islands and Island groups. I guess he hates Yankee weather.
2. Bloom County characters.
3. Norse Gods.
4. Sci-Fi authors.
5. Some mail servers I know of are named after
nearby train stations.
almost EVERY company I've worked for uses greek/roman gods (and badly misspelt, as well.)
So when I got control of the DNS zone, my first sysadminial job was to give decent hostnames.
One IP block got characters from J.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" and "Silmarillion."
The other got Sumerian/Babylonian gods. Nothing like logging into marduuk to feel better about yourself.
AS for my domain, I just make as many cheezy puns involving thw word 'breakdown' as i can (the server in my info is down btw)
chemical.breakdown.org
nervous.breakdown.org
mental.breakdown.org
emotional.breakdown.org
molecular.breakdown.org
total.breakdown.org
communications.breakdown.org (my *backup* mail server, isn't that witty!)
Basically, if I see another greek/Roman naming convention, I will have to slap people silly. There are hordes of fun pagan pantheons to use. Hell, they don't even need to be REAL! yog-sothoth.foo.com would be fun to admin.
I can picture an exasperated sysadmin. "Yog-sothoth is possessed, I swear." "What could possibly possess a machine named after a demon?" ( || "Something worse: NT.")
Three Step Plan:
1. Take over the world.
2. Get a lot of cookies.
3. Eat the cookies.
Second point: I like to name servers after words that I like. It's not a very coherent scheme, as these words can sometimes be names, sometimes moods, sometimes adjectives. But they're all words that I like, so as far as I care, it's a perfectly rational naming convention (as in, I can always tell if a name is part of the "potential names set" simply bty thinking: 'Do I like it?'). My current machines are named continuity (and you all know where that comes from, right?), paranoia, and velocity. I'd think of some more, but I haven't had enough coffee yet today. My vocabulary hasn't woken up yet.
----
Morning gray ignites a twisted mass of colors shapes and sounds
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
When I worked at CTP, we had machines with names from the Hobbit. Except the administrator was not familiar with the Hobbit, and somehow managed to spell all the names *wrong*. So we had names like Billbo (should be Bilbo) and Gollim (should be gollum I think).
My machines at home are named for elements. My Thinkpad 486/33 printer server is named Hydrogen. My main work machine is named Helium. I have a Thinkpad laptop that is named Lithium. I used to have a machine for experimentation named Beryllium, but that's too much to type so I named it Boron instead. My wife's machine is named Platinum because that's the substance our wedding rings are made of.
And the really nice thing about these element names is that they have standard abbreviations, so I can type telnet lithium, or I can type telnet li. I have noticed that some programs do not like single character machine names, so telnet h to reach the machine named hydrogen doesn't work.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
We succesfully argued that while "utilitarian" machine names may make sense on workstations, they're completely unhelpful on servers. We want names that are short, catchy, and easy to remember, not mouthfuls of characters & digits. Then we can alias them to more "practical" names in the DNS if necessary.
In fact, this is much handier than ordinary 'descriptive' names. For example, we're in the process of replacing our old single-CPU mail server with a new SMP box... At the moment 'mail' is aliased to the old box, 'hermes', while we prepare the new one. Once it's ready to go, we transfer the accounts & spoolfiles, adjust the DNS so 'mail' -> 'coyote' and voila -- the users don't see a blip.
I tend to prefer mythological/religious names, probably because they command a little more awe and respect than names like "Tweety" and "Goofy". Unfortunately, I'm no good at keeping it within one culture...
At the moment:
mail server: Hermes
mail server-to-be: Coyote
Intranet & "Knowledge Base": Thoth
Webserver: StellaMaris
Oh, and at home, the outside of my firewall is named "elohim" and the inside is "metatron"... Mmm, cabalistic humor.
--
perl -e '$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00";
s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72,
$_="06fde129ae54c1b4c8152374c00"; s/(.)/printf "%c",(10,32,65,67,69,72, (74..76),(78..80),(82..85))[hex $1]/eg;
I never really heard of Korolev. Thanks for the suggestion. I heard of Tsiolkovsky and am considering him. Maybe I'll just have to get two computers.
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"
Richard von Weizs
Here where I work, most of the names of the machines are names of different brands of junk food (although some have gone to brands of beer). For instance my machine is Swissroll, the file server is Twinkie, and we have other machines like Twizzler, Blowpop, Jolt, Pretzels and so on.
;-)
In another part of the company they started naming machines after planets, which was okay until they got to Uranus... It leads to questions like: "Where's Pluto? -- Over by Uranus!"
hehehe
Sad, but true.
I work (well, am actually a member of) an LLC with a very flat management structure. All of the technical people have the job title of "Systems Engineer" whether we program, manage the telecom system, the LAN, or the WAN. Since most of us wear multiple hats, anything more specific would be deceptive anyway. "Glorified Computer Nerd" would probably be more accurate (and would probably help to weed out perspective employees who are humor impaired if put on one's resume), but even that would be too specific, as some of us manage the phone system as well.
Titles really aren't that meaningful -- any smart employer is going to pay much more attention to the job description, and descriptions of past projects, when looking over resumes, than the job title. I still can't believe people will actually accept job title upgrades/changes in liue of a raise -- indeed, I wouldn't have believed it at all if I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, at a previous job. Personally, I work for money, not prestige. My good luck that I was able to make a hobby a career, and really enjoy what I do, and as long as the pay is right, I don't care if they call me "Systems Engineer" or "Computer Custodian".
PS - I like your naming convention!
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Freedom of naming our servers is a fundamental systems admin right! They'll take that away when the pry my trackball from my cold, dead hand!
...
:-)
Our naming convention is to name all Windows boxes after dinasaurs (guess why?), all sun workstations and servers after stars (ok, that's kind of boring, but millionair names kept getting more and more diffuclt to come up with and spell, even if you do have to be one to own one of those machines yourself), linux boxes after countries, with some exceptions for firewall, routers, and the like
Of course, since I define that stuff, I'm free to change it at will. The names do sound reasonably professional, and only insiders really understand why that flakey NT box, due to be phased out soon, is called stegosaurus.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
My office uses WWII generals - it's a small work group so it's not really an issue.
Personally, I feel that since we are an international company, something more universal would be appropriate. I favor celestial bodies. Pick the scale depending on the network size (server count).
Stars if there are many servers, planets if there are few. This also works well with constellations, Greek/Roman mythology... Then go Assyrian, Egyptian, Hindu, Norse.
Ancient religions are particularly apropos for global (or multi-OS) companies, since they can suggest the geographical location of the server (or divvy up the servers thematically by OS), as well as denoting their function. You may have to do some digging to find the name of the Egyptian messenger god for your North African SMTP server, but it's a learning experience, and you'll never forget it. A firewall named Charon is cool as hell, as is a web server named Arachne...
You're absolutely right. Cryptic, machine server names take the joy out of it. The network naming conventions should reflect the personality of it's handlers and of the organization they serve.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
When we had to set up the network for our company at the start of the year, it was agreed that we'd use SciFi chicks (and SciFi men for the ladies in the firm). Works pretty well. Can't get more appropriate than Ivanova for a firewall! Mmmm ... Zef ...
We picked a convention that lets us have a little fun, but still walks the "professional corporate line."
We're a communications and navigations manufacturer, so we chose cities. Toronto, Berlin, etc... The entertaining part (for geeks like me) is when the names mean something. Here's a quick list of some of the better ones:
Alexandria -- web server
Pergamum -- backup web server
Istanbul -- e-commerce server
Chernobyl -- test Netware box
Shiloh -- test AS/400 box
and my favorite (although not very PC, it seems that most everyone can take a joke)
Dresden -- firewall
Of course, Rockwell's firewall is asbestos - pretty hard to top that.
I've also used classical composers and great authors for names. Gives you an ego kick when someone asks "Who the hell is Kafka?"
But don't use a CNAME for an MX or an NS. :)
I generally do manual-cname for things like 'mail'. I point the name at the right box, but I don't use a CNAME, or I wouldn't be able to use it as an MX.
But, I *do* give the machine a "real" name that reflects the box, not the job.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Um, hate to be the guy to point this out, since the article & posts make so many good points, but the "tree" names Oak, Ash, Thorn, etc. that are so "unimaginative" and "don't relate to function" are probably the results of an earlier admininstrator who has read one of the many translations of the great epic The Battle of the Trees (or Cad Goddeau). This work is fundamental to understanding pre-christian Celtic cultures, and was the major topic of Robert Graves' magnum opus The White Goddess . Written as a long poem with debatable religious connotations, the Cad lists attributes and deeds of the various trees, and encrypts the ogham alphabet.
A much more global, understandable, and useful convention than "Xmen", whatever they are. And if you're into offending the politically correct, it's also a way to suggest the scandalous idea that white folks might have an ethnic heritage.
--Charlie
Hmmm, :-(
/. spooky eh?
Only fools and horses characters (brit slant, but very amusing)
Philosophers - lots of long names though
Plaid and Boards of Canada song names.
Local stars - eridani, tau_ceti etc. etc.
Gnu people - richard, eric etc. etc.
random latin - keeps the PHBs happy.
and my personal favorite: porn stars!
I think the thought police are after me though - I was thinking a couple of days ago how cool it would be to swap naming conventions on
----- Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM' - Alan Cox.
Explain to management that a machine's name is different from what it does. It might make sense to name your primary database server "SQL1", but two years down the road, it'll be too old and feeble to do any serious database work, and you'll put it on someone's desk to read mail with. Then that person will wind up with a workstation named SQL1, which is bogus.
Machines (and their names) come and go. Use CNAME records to indicate a machine's functionality. Make "SQL1" a CNAME that points to "Goofy" today, and "Cyclops" tomorrow after you upgrade.
cpeterso
Back to work then; I will be naming workstations too, and there I'm thinking of a general theme per room such as a book and the computers having names from that theme or book. For the servers, I'm giving them more descriptive names that explains what the computer is and does. Some examples are crash-and-burn which actually COULD be a Win98 station with a CD-RW, but it's in fact the name I use for installations I work with, play with, throw in the floor and in general aren't very nice too. The server which will hold the WinNT profiles is ofcourse named profiler and my laptop to which I tunnel an IP-number to whereever I am is called circuitous-route.
We usually go with a theme for various computers. Employee computers are named after certain things, servers after another theme, etc. Here's some of the one's we've used that last a long time with naming...
Saturday Night Live Names:
Garth, Wayne, Carsenio, Churchlady, Landshark, Hans, Frans, etc.
Simpsons:
Homer, Marge, Smithers, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, MrBurns, etc.
Star Wars:
Luke, Leia, Han, Jabba, Anakin, C3PO, R2D2, Biggs, ObiWan, etc.
Really anything that has a lot of neverending names work well. These three we feel here work best and will always have some new name, even when you think they ran out.
While it may sound silly I worked at a university library. To keep all the names 'sensible', each department decided on a naming group. So all the computers in tech services were named after candy bars. The admin section was named after writters (which really made sense), and the main servers were to be named after past presidents of the library. This actually made sense, and in a way you got an idea of what you had to deal with when you knew which machine had problems. So the guy who had bradbury as his machine gave you a clue as to what type of person he was. Of course we also had a computer named dominatrix.
-cpd
check rfc2100 out. This is a _true_ guide to naming a box (and it's in iambic pentameter).
Also, the company i work for has a customer who named all of their boxes after sesame street characters. You'd think it'd be easy , but try and name 10 of 'em...after you get past the big birds and oscars, you end up spending hours trying to figure out the name of the garbage man (bruno)..
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
I totally agree on giving nice looking and sounding names to machines. I used to give names related to music (coz' I l0ve music =) like "funky", "dance", "bossa" or whatever.
My experience as a sysadmin (was Good Time back then) is that everything is prettier if you use a fixed name length, 5 chars is a good choice. It helps you having well formatted config and log files, thus making sysadmin tasks easier.
hope this helps
A+
gdon
In order to avoid "stupid" names our former illustrious leader instituted an excellent naming scheme. We can use any name we like as long as it comes from a standard Ordnance Survey Map (Whitby and surrounding area)
This sounds dull, but we have machines like tumulus, potato, hackness, scratch and scar.
We haven't yet used "Hole of Horcum" or "Lower Bell End" but one day they will take their place alongside Dismantled, and Danger Area.
Zwack (on Claymoor, as I'm Scottish)
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
The firewall is, of course, called goat. Goats eat everything. The firewall . . . well . . . :-)
The webserver (static content) is called sheep. Because sheeps are pretty unexciting creatures. And when you think about it, once everything is up and running webservers aren't that exciting either.
The NT domino server is named Ox, because of its elegance and speed. The other NT server doesn't have an animal name, but it is called Blimp in honor of the size of the OS that runs on it.
The mail exchange is called cow. Since cows basically munch grass all day, and "cow" does the same for mail.
...for NT machines. =)
Actually, it makes sense...because they used to call Titanic unsinkable, whereas HP sells the "unstoppable" Windows NT!
-----------
"You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding."
The first server I ever had the chance to name, I named Wintermute. This was in 1991, and it was a screamer, a 486/66 with 8 megs of Ram, 2 1 gig SCSI drivers and SCO/Unix, whoa boy!
For my PC's at home, I use the names of Grateful Dead songs.
My IBM PC330 I named Liberty. A catchy little thing, but with few prospects for expansion (3 slots, 3 drive bays, feh!).
I named the Cyrixed 486 I bought for $5 at a garage sale Deal, though only runs for a few days before the hardware makes it crash. It's due for a motherboard replacement.
I named the Dell 486 I bought at a garage sale ( I overpaid, but I had little time and I desperately needed a running server) Terrapin, becuase it keeps going, and going, and going ( you need to have seen the Dead do Terrapin Station live to appreciate this).
I still have a P90 to put together, maybe I'll name it Dark Star, since right now it's apart, in formless pieces of matter.
George
Some of our machines are named after the Dilbert cartoon:
Dilbert
Dogbert
etc...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
It sounds like a lot of people commenting on this thread don't have to take care of over 5000 machines running multiple flavors AND versions of *ix, NT, along with multiple NFS servers offering terrabytes of data, AFS servers also offering a ton of data, with everything working across multiple physical sites.
Creative naming schemes are fun when your environment is small. They don't scale though. There are times when it's nice to be able to grep the NIS hosts map for a pattern and know you just tagged every machine in the env running Solaris 2.6 on SuperSparc architectures.
-AutumnLeaf
The admins here where I work named one type of the large machines we work on after Top Gun characters - Iceman, Maverick, Goose, Viper, Merlin, etc. Then they named another type after boxers - Foreman, Frazier, etc (those are very hard to remember).
They've also grouped some of the sun workstations by planet. I'm in the mars group, they've also got saturn, mercury, etc...
I personally would name my machines after bad weather - lightning, thunder, blizzard, cyclone, tornado, hail, hurricane. Though I was naming my x-terms after Djinns/Efreets from Magic: The Gathering. Juzam, Mahamoti, etc...
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
There's another, more important reason why your server names should not reflect their functionality. It's a security issue; you don't want intruders to understand your network architecture at first glance by just looking at the names of the servers.
"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"
All right Mr. Whipple, you were the first one who didn't mention a search engine (doesn't anyone use their heads any more?).
Gave that man a virtual Weizenbier, put it on my tab.
Got a twenty-seven B stroke six?
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
I'll buy a virtual beer for whoever figures out the reference of the second list.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind
What about borg name's they sound professional :-)
e.g. you can call your SQL servers 1of3 2of3 and 3of3
---
The elite Pz Divisions for the big iron, such as Liebstandarte, Das Reich and Totenkopf.
Then there are a number of second line Pz Divisions, as well as several Panzer Grenadier Division for support boxes.
Then there are a number of specialist units such as 12th SS Pz Div Hitler Jugend - the young and reckless box (test environment).
Lastly there are a number of foreign legion divisions such as Galacia, Wiking, etc, etc.
The wonderous thing about this scheme is that each Division has a unique number (which all computer staff have to be familiar with of course), which you can use for unique number in the IP address scheme !!!
Once this has been done, you can then name development projects after towns in Russia and re-live Barbarossa all over again ...
For weekly meetings, make sure that your development staff all attend in period costume, each divisional 'General' in turn can snap to attention, deliver their report in short and sharp tones, and then click their heels loudly ...
You should see the look of total puzzlement on management's faces when you conclude your weekly activity reports with - 'Ve have trapped Die Bolschevisten in the Kharkov pocket and 3rd SS Pz Das Reich vill smash them by the end of ze veek ... Sieg Heil !!!'
You can of course change the subject matter if not being completely PC is more to your liking .. In another company that I know of, the IT manager turned up to the board meeting dressed as Cortez, (complete with conquistador helmet) with his retinue dressed as Catholic priests and inquisitors ..
When concluding his report, he pounded his fist onto the table and declared that 'By months end, the Toltec empire will be ours, and by the Grace of God, the gold of the Mayan temples would be sailing forwith for Spain ! - Long Live His Majesty !'
I used to work at Oxford University, called my servers Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Bud, Lou etc. But the best was the department that studied disease etc. theirs were called Typhoid, Cholera, Plague etc!
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
First, never *ever* name the computers after the function they do (e.g. Billing, Accounting, Support, Engineering, ...etc.) nor by the people that are using them (JohnB, GregC, ...etc.
Companies and divisions get merged or eliminated and you have to live with the misnomer. Also people move on, and name stays. We had a printer called Hashmi after the guy left the office (and eventually the whole company) for YEARS...
Also, never name the machines by their vendor, serial number, model, ...etc. Anyone remembers the machine called VAX somewhere in the UUCP mail days, and it got replaced by a Sun, but was still called VAX?
Some nice themes include:
--
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
Actually, that's what comments in the NIS host map are for, in combination with custom Perl scripts. Then you can have ALL kinds of useful info, including architecture, OS, network connection, physical location, shelf-space #, current primary responsible admin, etc... Try doing that in a 8-16 character hostname.
Tim Gaastra
Tim Gaastra
Build a better mousetrap and the world will immediately get their fingers caught in it.
Let's say you have the "logical" name of Linux2214pc. Does that "tell" you what it does? Nope. Does it say what Linux extensions it has? Nope. Does it tell you what software is installed? Nope. Will it remain valid, after the next kernel patch is installed? Nope.
Now, I -do- logically name kernels, by what additional patches are in there. Now, I don't -have- to, but it's handy. I could -equally- use names of characters (real or imaginary) that symbolise those same characteristics.
Now, I'm going to turn the question around. Which is more "logical"? A name that has no permanent, derived connection with the machine, or a name which symbolises the very essence of what's there?
IMHO, the answer is simple. It's actually =ILLOGICAL= to name computers after OS versions, location on a network, or some other transitory feature. You move the machine, install a security patch, or add some capability, and the name becomes invalid. That is not logical. YOUR name doesn't become invalid, every time you read a book or move house! Why should a computer's?
What IS logical is to choose a name which symbolises the essence of what you're going to do with the computer. This will be far less subject to change than mere physical location. If I pick the name "Gandalf" for a computer, the chances are it's NOT going to be for word-processing. Most people know a newspaper is a place to turn for information, so a server called "ThePress" or "Tabloid" is readily identified for what it does.
I know, dull corporations prefer dull names. However, all is not lost. Either alias or multihome your servers. eg: Use a STABLE, SYMBOLIC name as the principle name, and use the unstable, lacklustre, corporate name as an alias. That way, you (and other general users) can know what's where, and the bosses can be happy, all at the same time.
(Sadly, I doubt many exec's would comprehend the benefits of compromise, like this.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
My tiny lan at home is named after beer styles. The beefier the machine, the darker the beer.
SMP 450Mhz workstation is "Porter"
200Mhz gateway is "Lager"
133Mhz laptop is "Weizen"
486sx-25 laptop is... "Lite"
Maybe someday I can afford a "Stout" - or even "Barleywine!"
:)
Just a few thoughts from a few years of working in academia, the land of interesting names. My last department had machines named after... characters in "Robin Hood" (guess where), cartoon characters, racing drivers, racing circuits, sleazy politicians, participants in royal scandals, priests, fruits beginning with "p", characters from "Red Dwarf", famous traitors, emotions, and.. and.. different naming schemes for different labs or groups. As well as being interesting and varied, this has the added advantage of knowing exactly where a machine is once you know how the schemes work, which isn't as easy when all you have to go on is a random number like "sun0195".
And last but not least, rainstorming for machine names is a great way to liven up a dull meeting.
But history has shown how easy it is to get through Trotsky's ICE.
Now that I think of it, though, it makes sense. If Boris Yeltsin is naming his servers after all his prime ministers, then every time he gets a new box he's got to change PMs.
Wanna precipitate another crisis in Russia? Send Boris a laptop.
So far out of that list I've used frantica, maxima, abnorma, awfu, musica, termina, fata, norma, individua, geographica, idea, and sexua.
The possibilities are endless.
1: Every functional machine type (firewall, app server, DB server, communication server, personal) gets a theme. If you are feeling cute enough, the themes are related (like mammals/fish/insects/birds). In most places, machines don't change functional groups often: once a machine is installed as a database server, it will never serve as anything but a database server.
2: Every machine gets a name based on its group theme. This is the canonical name of the box.
3: If those in power want to use machine-understandable names, make them the canonical names. Then take theme names and bind them to the machine-understandable names, so that HP102x is always, say, Everest, no matter what else happens to the machine. The theme name will likely become the canonical name in everyday speech.
4: Machines get functional names based on their current function. The second mail server gets the name mail_2 or somesuch. This is a secondary name. If the box gets reassigned as a Web server, it gets renamed www_2 or somesuch.
4a: Personal machines (desktops, laptops, Palm Pilots, Dreamcasts...) get a functional name based on their primary user (usually username). If people get multiple computers, they get prefixes or suffixes. Thus, I could have a Linux machine named l_remande, and an NT machine called n_remande. Resist the temptation to make the username name the canonical name; the machine has to get renamed when its primary user leaves your operation, and that often happens more often than computers obsolescing.
The username name is more important than it sounds. People will forget the canonical names of each others' machines (because you never use them), but need to know them to fix them. If I am told that Mary's machine has a problem, I don't have to guess whether I have to log into "mako" or "bluefin", I just log into "mary".
5: When setting up a resource farm (where people can access one of many machines), make sure that all the names are easy to remember and easy to type. At WPI, there was a lab full of DECStations that all answered to things from Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension. Most of the load was on "yaya"; little of it went onto boxes like "planet_10" or "bigboote". The problem was that lazy users saved keystrokes with "telnet yaya", and you don't risk misspelling "bigboote". Elsewhere on campus, it was worse: a math lab had machines named after mathemeticians. Everybody logged onto "godel" and "newton"; I don't even remember the names of the other boxen.
6: Side note: in-jokes work. In the aforementioned Banzai lab, one of the DECStations was still down as the students arrived. By the time it was repaired and booted, it got the name "realsoon". One user at another site had three computers, and the theme was artificial intelligence: he had "huey", "dewey", and "louie" (from Silent Running, not Disney).
7:Good themes share some common attributes. They should have a large, if not infinite, range of names (name them after states, and you can only run fifty machines). The theme should either be extremely obvious (like many nature themes), or be easy to gain context on. Buckaroo Banzai isn't too bad, as you can rent the video: cult movie characters are worse, as you would have to rent a lot of movies to get the joke. People's names are bad: names strange enough not to conflict with the user base are often too strange to remember or type.
These are all internal naming conventions. External names should be different.
--The basis of all love is respect
We couldn't figure out what happened for a while, until someone typed the command:
telnet xb
And got back something to the effect of:
telnet: cannot connect to 0.0.0.11
Telnet had read xb, not as a machine name, but as a hexidecimal IP address!
It quickly became xblb (Xenix Build Lab), solving the problem.
--The basis of all love is respect
Josef
Leonid
Yuri
Maxim
Vladimir
and Leon (Trotsky) is coming soon.
--
Max V.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Don't forget about Alchohol, Nicotine, Prozac, and Viagra. Thinks about it..
"What's the average uptime for Viagra?"
"How long has he been on Crack?"
"LSD seems to make the network act funny."
+&x
RFC 1178 has some good things to say on the topic, too.
1. Don't choose names which relate to funcionality.
This sounds like a joke ("he's saying DON'T use helpful names? huh?") but I'm quite serious. The new machine you are now installing might indeed be destined to run the mail server. All the same, don't name it "mail" or "mail1" or anything like that.
Here's why. A machine can change its function, and a function can be carried out by more than one machine. And machines can carry out more than one function. There is no straightforward one-to-one link between names and functions - so don't try to force one.
It's quite possible that at some point this new machine won't be the mail server any more. At that point, being called "mail" would be a more likely to confuse people than help them.
It's equally possible that you might decide to run a news server on the machine - while it's still a mail server. Can you imagine the conversation?
"I need some setup information for Netscape. What's our mail server called?"
"It's called mail."
"Oh, cool. That's easy. Now, what's the news server called?"
"Uhm... also mail..."
"Oh. Well that's dumb. OK. Finally I need to know what machine our LDAP server is on."
"Uhm.. it's on 'news'".
Not impressive, I think you'll agree.
Here's what to do instead. Give the machines arbitrary names. Then put CNAMES in your DNS for the services pointing to the actual machines.
If you can do that, you can tell people "our SMTP server is called 'SMTP'" and "our news server is called 'news'" and they can keep those settings for ever - you just change what the CNAME points to. You can even make the CNAME round-robin across several actual machines for load balancing - all without the user needing to know.
This doesn't just apply to the traditional services, but also to your own applications. If you have a stock control computer which people telnet to, don't call it "stockctl". Call it "bart" and put in a CNAME pointing to it. Even if you think you'll never change anything, it's worth allowing for the possibility that you will at the start.
2. Don't choose names which relate to form.
This means, for instance, that if your new mail server is a Compaq, it's a bad idea to call it "compaq" or "compaq3" or "cpq00153533" where 153533 might be the serial number.
Why's this bad? Because this information is a) useless, b) hard to remember, and c) likely to become wrong.
If you have a hundred workstations mounting volumes off a machine called "cpq00153533" you're going to have a rough time the day you upgrade the box to "cpq00182243". (Such names are also hard to tab expand if you've set up tcsh to do that as I have.) Unless, of course you just decide to keep the old name, although it is now wrong as well as annoying.
If you've called your machines "dellXXX", apart from trying to remember that "dell159" is your mailserver and "dell195" your quake server, you're going to be in difficulty when you replace some or all of them with IBMs.
The fact is that the manufacturer, model or serial number actually tells you nothing you need to know about a system in day to day use. You might need to know about its disk configuration, contents of /etc/passwd, or available memory, but you will rarely need to remember if it's a 333Mhz or a 366Mhz - and if you do, it should be in your product inventory database (hosted on "ibm104032" of course).
So, the principles in summary:
- Don't use functional names as hostnames. Put in CNAMES for the functional names instead. You'll save yourself lots of grief in the long run.
- Don't use names describing the physical setup, as that's useless, annoying, and incorrect far too often to be relied upon anyway.
Applying these principles requires that there be an "intermediate" naming convention which deliberately does not convey information about function, and which also does not convey information about setup.I would suggest that this naming scheme should use names which are easy to type and remember rather than ones which are repetitive and formal. "srv001" through "srv999" might look nice and orderly, but in fact is much harder to remember and type than "rivers" or "cartoon characters" or "80's arcade games".
Might as well as prepare for the worst. Sometimes they are tasteless but they seem to fit.
Hindenburg
Titanic
Challenger
Spruce Goose
TowerofPiza
Cubs
- My boss arrives, and establishes the first Solaris workstation for the team. He names it artichoke, because he is boring and went with a vegetable theme.
- I arrive next, and have always wanted to do Shakespearean characters (although I hear they are common, I've never gotten to use them). I have two machines to config, so I call them macbeth and macduff.
- The first sys admin is hired. He follow my lead and creates hamlet, prospero, lear, and falstaff.
- That admin, being a contractor, leaves us and is replaced. New admin sees macbeth and macduff and decides to go with the "mac-word" theme. Eschewing "macintosh" because it's too easy, he makes macnugget, macleod, mac-n-cheese(I don't know how he spelled it to make it legal) and macfly. He admits he stretched it in a few of those cases.
- Seeing "macfly" his assistant goes with the "taglines from 80's teen movies" naming scheme, and makes the next machine bueller.
- I don't know what comes next.
I may have forgotten a few.www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.