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  • I don't name my computers, but usually name my OS drive Brain and the media drive Pinky.

  • Servers and computers get Ankh-Morpork street names.

    The robot vacuum cleaner is GLaDOS.

  • Damnit, I'm boring af. Machines are named by their model for laptops/consumer devices and buy their CPU for home built stuff.

    Except for Crimson-Binome.local 🏴‍☠️

  • I once named a load of servers for a helicopter company in the UK with elements. The cluster nodes were copper, silicon, etc. The cluster itself was called iron. The volumes were labelled fe_function.

    It worked - it was easy to read and the bits that implied "cluster" were grouped appropriately. All the other servers had random elemental names unless they were associated in some way, in which case the group would be used. The engineers (real engineers with oil or distressingly nasty lubricants in their veins) loved it - it made sense, without being too quirky. It was very legible.

    When those systems were hoicked out and replaced, the usual nonsense was applied: 2 char country code + 2 char site code etc etc ad nauseam. Followed by my absolute pet hate: 01. Oh so you might need 99 domain controllers? Yes you might, but not on one site.

    Let's face it, it is mostly AD admins who don't get hostnames. I blame MS - their docs and blogs strive to be ... authoritative or at least look so. An entire generation (possibly two) of sysadmins have been sold up the river by MS and their wankery.

    • I completely agree with the "01" problem, it should be "001".

      Single digit is great but then one service needs more than ten, or you keep rolling them over into new ones (one of our production server is 13 because it's the thirteen generation). But then I want all the numbers of have consistent patterns, so if one has two digits, they all have to have it.

      But I'm not allowed to name servers anymore.

  • Previously by color/occupation.

    Red Desktop, Music Workstation.

    Been thinking themes more recently though. WolvesDen for my server, thinking of expanding on that some.

  • My old desktop, now relegated to torrent/fileshare duty, is named USELESS-BRICK (you can guess why)

    My brand new desktop is named SPEEDY-BRICK (you can also guess why)

    The Rpi3 and Orange Pi 5 I use for small compute tasks, a printer server, random fucking around, etc are TINY-BRICK-1 and TINY-BRICK-2, respectively.

    The random ATX server board that I used to use before the motherboard died was FlatBoard, because it didn't have a case, just a small steel backframe I welded up for it.

  • I like to have different naming schemes for different device classes.
    Desktop computers: Greek gods
    Laptops: Elements of the periodic table
    Cloud servers: Norse gods
    Home servers: Planets of the solar system
    Raspberry Pis: Greek titans

  • Nothing original;

    lappy386 - my laptop

    desktop (very original)

    mainframe - NAS/nextcloud/email

    orac - multimedia/jellyfin/photoprism/owntone

    bemo (I know, I cant spell) - pihole/unbound/homeassistant/wireguard

    Future servers will be named after any TV scifi tech that takes my fancy. (twiki, zen (or was it xen?), data, k-9, ada, marvin, romi, holly, bender, dolores). Any suggestions?

    • Ha! I love "lappy-386". I miss Strongbad emails. Especially the Halloween ones. And Trogdor.

  • My main PC is all white (by coincidence) so I named it Minas Tirith

  • My servers have names of Spanish words humorist El Risitas says in his mythical video where he laughs with no real reason.

    The biggest server is named "cocinero", because I can (jokingly) easily imagine a very fat cook.

    Then there is plancha, a lenovo thinkcentre which has the size of a plank.

    My raspberry pi's have names of tapas: chorizo, keso etc.

  • I name them after their case or purpose. My truenas is just called truenas, its plex jail is just called plex, my laptops are yoga and starlite because those are their product line names. Desktop is frame because it uses a masterframe 700.

    I am not very imaginative with naming things. And when I do get imaginative I just appear to have a mental disorder. My BG3 characters are Scrimpus, Scrompus, and Screeper.

    • Desktop - Eldritch Mythos
    • Laptop - Elder Thing
    • Phone - Shoggoth

    As for why, I don't know why I originally went this route. The phone is a Pixel 7, so it's name was inspired by the meme.

    My servers all are named after their purpose, no theme for them lol.

  • My computer names don't really have a pattern.
    Desktop is Neutron, NAS hyperion, old server exscape.

    Disks have names from astronomy. Cassiopeia, Andromeda, Pegasus, Orion.
    I just recently named my large NAS RAIDZ2 array Laniakea.

  • In theme with my username:

    • apollo (router)
    • moon-base (proxmox host)
    • moon-rover (previously my laptop, it died and now it's my steam deck)
    • moonshot (desktop)
    • moon-lander (phone)

    My VMs are uninterestingly named after what they serve. Also I'm not touching my partner's machines, that stuff is not my problem.

  • Mine are all named after mythological creatures. It started with my tower being named Cerberus because it had 3 red LED fans and then just kept up from there. Hydra, Thoth, manticore, chimera. I'm deploying Baba Yaga this week, and Ratatoskr will be up eventually

113 comments