I’ve ended up with a number of machines on my network, and a need to name them all in a somewhat logical way. For several years I had them named after the planets, which worked well until the PCs for myself, my girlfriend, servers and Raspberry Pi’s quickly summed up to more than the eight planets. I’ve broadened it somewhat to include any Greek/Roman mythological figure, but the system is definitely not as clean as it used to be.
Do you have a coordinated naming theme for your machines?
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Every machine is named after what it does (although I do 1337-ify the names, because I’m still a late 90s IRC teen at heart). If you’ve ever been onboarded into a sysadmin role where all the machines are named with whatever whimsical naming scheme each department chose, you’ll fast develop a visceral hatred for non-descriptive naming schemes. The fifth time you get a ticket saying something like ‘Hedwig is down’ and you have to go crawling through three layers of linked files on SharePoint to find what and where ‘Hedwig’ is, you’ll be ready to beat the person who named it to death, and that attitude tends to persist to your home naming scheme :p
So more of a “cattle” than “pet” approach in general?
Ungulates. Because who doesn’t like a hoofed animal?
My client machines are even-toed ungulates (order Artiodactyla) and my servers/IoT machines are odd-toed (order Perissodactyla). I’m typing this on Gazelle. My router is called Quagga, both after the extinct zebra subspecies and the routing protocol software (I don’t use it any more but hey, it’s a router).
Biological taxonomy is a great source of a huge number of systematic (and colloquial) names.
Discworld characters. My storage servers name is Luggage, my phone is ‘Ig’, the vacuum is named after a monk.
I’m incredibly boring. I name them with the company/model name. And what role they have appended.
Cute naming schemes are for people who don’t have lots of servers. At my work we have over 700 servers. We’re not naming them after something arbitrary, we’re being descriptive.
Depending on the size of the machine I’ll call it big/large/huge/small/Lil then a human name like John. BigJohn is my main server and hopefully one day he can get an upgrade and become large John.
This, but it’s all suggestive names, such as:
Big Johnson, Small Richard, lil Peter, Huge Willy, etc.
