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I need a new name convention

I’m slowly adding computers to my network now, and I’m discovering that not setting up a proper name convention when I only had 2 or 3 PCs is going to now be a problem. I want to think of a standard now while I’m in the process of moving things around and refining the network - before things really get out of hand.

At first, I was just naming machines willy nilly. I only had study and workstation . Later I was doing the whole greek/roman mythological figure thing, and trying to choose a figure that was similar to the function, or a name that was pretty obscure. My first named server was bellerophon. I got a laptop later and named it sirius. Then I built a mythTV box and I called dionysus. When bellerophon died on me, I had to move things around and dionysus became the new server. So tying functions to machines is probably not a good idea either.

In the last few months it’s become a horrible jumble, with the new server being called garcon (it’s French for “server”), and naming the firewall hades seemed appropriate. I really need to reign things in or it’s going to be unbareable.

I admire friends of mine that have a good grip on this sort of thing - like naming all of your machines for song titles of your favorite band (make sure you don’t pick a one-hit-wonder though - in case you need to scale up). Others that use a theme like Tolkein, and all the servers are places and the workstations are characters.

I read where one guy picked a state that he always like to go to on vacation, and named the servers after the counties and the workstations after the cities.

I’d like to think of something that’s pretty creative, yet easy to remember, and most of all unique to me. Which means I think I’ll be thinking about this for a while.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 29th, 2006 at 11:11 PM and is filed under Code, Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “I need a new name convention”

Gregory Haase Says:

After some consideration and thought - I think I figured it out. I’m going to mull it over for a few days before I make it a final decision, but I’m really leaning towards fish!

I’m not kidding - it’s a wonderful subject matter because there are so many species and varieties out there, that it should scale quite nicely. Also, it seems that there a lot of fish names that are 8 characters or less, which is nice and short.

So for Desktops, I’m going to use the names used for Sushi (Japanese names spelled with American characters or romanji): akami, unagi, toro, sake, hamachi, maguro, ebi, fugu, hirame, kani, saba, tai, tako, tobiko, uni, ikura.

For Servers and Peripherals, I’m going to use fresh and saltwater fish names: bass, bluegill, perch, pike, walleye, trout, striper, grouper, flounder, carp, gar, pickerel, dolphin, marlin, snapper, baracuda.

I can see the possibilities already - the firewall should be named “walleye”. And whatever gets named “striper” will have to have some kind of raid array - probably the file server. The LDAP server might be called “grouper”. And this Dell L433c that I just got back together from a collection of spare parts will most likely become “crappie”.

December 30th, 2006 at 3:51 PM
smed Says:

I’ve always used plants or trees for hostnames. I one studied horticulture and botany, so it wasn’t really a stretch.
I have on several occasions named various boxes “orion” from the great constellation, for no particular reason really, its just a neat name.
I think my most unique name was a fluke with about 10 seconds worth of thought in it, and that is my wife’s machine(my 7 year old Pentium 3), “boxcar”. As in “boxcar willie” I suppose…..not sure where that one came from.

I think the fish theme is cool, you’ve got a lot of material to work with.

January 1st, 2007 at 2:26 PM
wbilancio Says:

You can use character names from tv series. I do that for my home network.

January 1st, 2007 at 9:50 PM
jonesy Says:

I like tying names to *some* aspect of the machine. Sometimes I tie it to function, but other times it’s other stuff. For example, we have a machine whose sole purpose in life is to respond to requests for licenses from matlab clients. I named that machine “dmv”, because that’s where you go for licenses. We have general purpose ‘cycle servers’ here at work - 4 of them - so we named them ’soak’, ‘wash’, ‘rinse’ and ’spin’. If we got more of them, we’d have to break that pattern, but chances are we’d want to group hardware purchased together in some way anyway.

However, a couple of years ago, I got a shiny new G4 Apple desktop, and I named it ‘gala’, which is an apple that starts with the letter G and is 4 characters long :-)

I really like the sushi name idea because most of the names are short. I don’t like long hostnames, but don’t know enough about sushi to go down that path.

January 2nd, 2007 at 8:49 AM