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RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

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Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#81

Post by logifail »

xtiansimon wrote: post #34
gspr wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use animals, mostly. Except any ARM-based device must be named after a limb or a part of a limb that is not an arm. It must.

I use food. Abstract, but also memorable.

Back at Uni we got four new workstations so obviously I named them 'death', 'war', 'famine' and 'pestilence'. Then shortly after we added a fifth, it ended up being 'mayhem'.*

Some time later we got two more boxen and the female members of our research group were given the job of naming them, and we ended up with 'itchy' and 'scratchy'...

* for the Pratchett readers I was wrong, it should of course have been 'Kaos'...

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#85

Post by chewxy »

I have named my machines after Doctor Who planets for the last 18 ish years. All new machines start as Gallifrey (workstation) or TARDIS (laptop).

Then as they stop being my primary devices they get other planet / ship names. The torrenting machine was suitably called Skaro. :p

Two exceptions are my PiHole and OctoPi. The old PiHole used to be called TimeLock but when I upgraded I didn't keep the name

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#87

Post by diftraku »

A long-time personal favourite naming scheme of mine has been Pokemons (and by extension, Digimons).

There's a good selection, it's pretty varied and there's no shortage of em (assuming you don't exceed 100-200 new systems in a 3 year period). This also has an accidental side-benefit of not being tasked to name new hosts at work, unless your really want to call the new database server Stufful, for example.

Another thing to keep in mind with more descriptive hostnames like `database`, is to serialize them from the start. It's a very minor thing but after you have three hosts with one of them missing the serialization, it's going to stand out like a sore thumb and it could be a major undertaking on changing that name where it's used.

When it comes to project names, there is a certain level of permanence that name (or codename) is going to have. Once chosen, that name will be thrown around in the codebase almost universally. The same does apply to the hostnames, at least in part when it comes to configuration files (and by extension, certain hard-coded hostnames that could linger around in the code years after the host in question has been decommissioned).

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#88

Post by MauranKilom »

diftraku wrote: post #87

A long-time personal favourite naming scheme of mine has been Pokemons (and by extension, Digimons). There's a good selection, it's pretty varied and there's no shortage of em (assuming you don't exceed 100-200 new systems in a 3 year period). This also has an accidental side-benefit of not being tasked to name new hosts at work, unless your really want to call the new database server Stufful, for example. Another th…

> When it comes to project names, there is a certain level of permanence that name (or codename) is going to have. Once chosen, that name will be thrown around in the codebase almost universally. The same does apply to the hostnames, at least in part when it comes to configuration files (and by extension, certain hard-coded hostnames that could linger around in the code years after the host in question has been decommissioned).

Or, as told by xkcd: https://xkcd.com/910/

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#89

Post by oarsinsync »

1996 wrote: post #74
alexjplant wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cute naming schemes are a holdover from the days of physical servers when location, function, etc were subject to change so an immutable machine name couldn't contain them. Now that most things are virtual and easily created/destroyed there's no good reason _not_ to name functionally. The most common refrain I've heard in defense of these archaic naming practices is that "we don't want the hackers to know which serve…

> Now that most things are virtual and easily created/destroyed there's no good reason _not_ to name functionally. Uh, my servers with at least 256G of RAM and a raid60 of more drives than you have virtual machines can't easily be moved around. > If you are dealing with assets in a physical environment then obviously the above doesn't apply. Yes, baremetal, the only way to guarantee performance!

> Yes, baremetal, the only way to guarantee performance!

Single function bare metal, that is. At which point, the boring functional naming scheme re-applies easily.

If you're running multiple different functions on a single box, how are you guaranteeing any performance for any single function? How does that differ from using a hypervisor with similar limiting features?

Re: RFC 1178: Choosing a name for your computer (1990)

#90

Post by hyperrail »

The weirdest naming scheme for computers I've seen is the one used some years ago by my college: It named Linux workstations after Linux kernel committers' email usernames!

There were the better-known folks like linus (Linus Torvalds [1]) and gregkh (Greg Kroah-Hartman [2]), but also relatively more obscure people, like shemminger (Stephen Hemminger [3]) and stelian (Stelian Pop [4]).

I didn't recognize most of those names at the time, but now that I do, I wonder what those people would have thought about having a large organization's computers named after them. A bit creeped out, I would think.

[1] https://github.com/torvalds

[2] http://www.kroah.com/log/

[3] https://www.linkedin.com/in/networkplumber/

[4] https://www.popies.net

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