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

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

#61

Back in the last century I worked for a company called MountainGate, where all the machines were predictably named after mountains. This suited my backpacking self well, and I continued the tradition with my own hardware after leaving: Dana, Tresidder, Hoffman, Lyell... Anarchist writers are my present theme: Goldman, Proudhon, Bookchin, Kropotkin... perhaps Graeber will be next.

related to this, in my first tech job as a UNIX guy at a Wall St. bank, my mentor was really into Hawaii, all the servers in our group were named after hawaiian volcanoes, e.g. mahukona, maunakea, kilauea, hualalai, etc. it was NOT fun, all of us kinda hated it, but i suppose it did engender in us a strong attention to detail!

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

#65
With a few exceptions, types of knives (because knives are symbolic of logical thought). Once a machine is given a name, that name is never reused.

I don't match the hostname to the purpose of the machine specifically to avoid the problem of the machine's purpose changing, and to make it easier to avoid reusing names.

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

#69
Context - I'm nearly 50 and had a ZX81. Doom on an IPX network with 486 level machines is where I had to start naming devices for LAN parties.

As a teenage boy I gave the computers female names which appealed to me. Never people I knew except by coincidence, but Sarena, Lucy, Kim, &c. were assigned to a machine once without being reused. Maybe they had a mindspace as characters in my life?

As time passed and I started living with various partners, names have changed to a more adult way of working.

I now have abbreviated owner and device descriptor. Exempli gratia: 'PredBook' is my Panasonic Toughbook. 'PredPS4' is self explanatory.

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

#70
DOTA2 characters.

Pudge is for a fat server with some VMs and more RAM.

Invoker is multi-purpose VPS without a specified one goal.

Riki is a RPi.

Rylai (Crystal Maiden) is for a MacMini, because it's all white and reminds me of snow.

I had Meepo for hosting a Matrix instance. Social communication means multiple people, so Meepo seems to fit perfectly. But it's switched off now (Meepo is not an easy character to play).

I have Ostarion for a seedbox, I'm switching providers from time to time, and I keep killing it and raising a new instance once every while.

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