Ask HN: How do you choose a hostname for personal devices?

I name mine after major rivers. Had a mekong, nile, danube. Sometimes it’s wordplay, my first Mac was Potomac.

For a long time I used names of (usually) the transitional metals on the periodic table. It started just as "Titanium" for a PowerBook G4 since that was its codename anyway, but went on from there.

Then it transitioned to plants and trees: aster, begonia, willow, maple. I had a shift in life where I began to value the organic world more than dry, boring metals.

I’ve had pet rabbit nearly my entire life and tend to name my devices after things rabbits do or nicknames I’ve given them - hopper, sniffer, nibbler, loafy, etc…

My college computer lab used element names. The ones hardest to spell had the least amount of people connected to them.

I name hosts after a place in the city I live in that is not where I live. Some hostnames from recent years are khamovnik, whitby, zamalek, sanduny.

It's interesting because it makes me consider places that I don't go to every day, and then rate them for "hostnameability" and so on. Ends up with hostnames being quite memorable.

Rivers, all lowercase.

My first Linux machine was `congo`. My oldest extent one is `volga`. And my beefiest (biggest) machine is `nile`.

My local backup NAS is `danube`, and my offsite server is `yangtze`.

If I were you, and didn't want boring job-themed names, choose a theme and use it.

You could choose mountains, and your biggest machine could be `everest`, while your most sacred could be `olympus`.

Or you could choose cities, Pokemon, anime characters, authors, fish, mammals, etc. Any category with a lot of items. Seas, for example, won't work because there aren't many.