It’s been a long time since I was in charge of a large number of computers, but I was once exposed to a scheme that I’ll never forget:

Each computer gets assigned an element, say “oxygen”. That element is its hostname. The machine is also setup to handle requests to the element’s atomic symbol (i.e., the machine is addressable by both oxygen.domain.tld and o.domain.tld), and we setup static IP addresses so that the least-significant-octet of each machine’s IP address was its atomic number (in the above example, 192.168.0.8). At the time, these were virtual machines, but we also talked about adopting a similar plan for physical machines, and choosing the machine’s identities based on their floor layout (not executed, but I love the idea of it) mapping to one of the periodic table renderings. Even just the pretty minimal version of this where a given group (e.g., transition metals) corresponds to machines which are physically near one another offers a huge additional bit of semantic information.

This is a naming scheme with enough flexibility to run a hundred or so addressable services, where just knowing the name gives you a lot of information about how you would reach the machine. What’s more, you can imagine extending it dramatically with isotopes.

I’ve never gotten over how elegant it seemed.

All the best,

-HG

At the computer science lab at the school where I earned my undergrad degree, all the machines were named after mountains in the Adirondacks. A few from memory include algonquin, dix, giant, hadley, haystack, and whiteface.

Still mad at the philistine who named the university computer lab’s computers after the moons of the solar system - Ganymede, Miranda, etc, and then used Moon instead of Luna.

I’m an enormous fan of using 16bi or 32bi proquint values for hostnames. gamis-nikag and fuhok-migir for instance are two machines on the network. Not all the generations have perfect enunciation, but they’re distinct, aren’t words/dictionary names and can be treated ephemerally without a numeric component. Love not having to break out the NATO phonetic.

I should perhaps mention that I found this RFC in the description for https://github.com/dustinkirkland/golang-petname.

We still have a few snowflakes running NixOS, our computer names are after female explorers like Barbara Hillary

At my first job, my boss wanted me to name the oldest computer after… the director of the organization. I countered with an argument along the lines of situations that are likely to occur:

• “Doe (not the real last name of the director) is down.”
• “Doe is not responding.”
• “Doe needs to be replaced.”
• … and so on.

I went with cars instead, so the first two were “Legend” and “Prizm”.

At work, we’ve got a very utilitarian naming scheme. “ws22” is “workstation 22”, “fs8” is “file server 8”, and so on.

At home, I’ve been naming computers after characters from Ghost in the Shell. Motoko, Kusanagi (yes, I know), Batou, Boma, Aramaki, Togusa, etc. Though I broke that trend recently with my StarFive VisionFive2 board (RISC-V), which is just named “vf2”. My excuse was that I was flashing and re-flashing the OS many times, and I haven’t figured out its “identity” yet.

I just call all my computers “cattle.”

I use three letters next to each other in the keyboard, to be quick.

Extremely well-known hostnames such as “sri-nic” and “uunet”

Certainly not know to me… what were those?

all my hostnames are shades of green: olive, jade, fern, and myrtle.

Mine have all been named after something bread-related after trolling the Wikipedia page and its related articles. I’ve had toaster, wheat, atta, germ, teff, biga, bpang, and my latest two are lavash and ollisbokollix.

I name my computers after combinator birds. It’s cute, and easy to remember. My current laptop is named kestrel.

We have a fleet of USFF Dell PCs that we use for control of hardware in the lab, which are named after fictional butlers (alfred, jeeves, wadsworth, niles, cadbury, lurch, etc) and another that are used to control manufacturing processes that form the Muppet show (animal, kermit, piggy, bunsen, beaker, etc). Much easier to talk about than serial numbers.

When I was starting out, I was semi-responsible for getting a machine named “Ferdyschenko”, after an exchange from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot: “Can one exist with a name such as Ferdyschenko[*]? Eh?” “Why not?” “Goodbye!”

No one remembered how to spell it, it had to be renamed. :-)

[*]: or was it “Ferdyshchenko”?

There are some organizational and geographical names that work fine. These are exactly the ones that do not function well as domain names. For example, amorphous names such as rivers, mythological places and other impossibilities are very suitable. (“earth” is not yet a domain name.)

is funny in retrospect, now that .amazon is a top-level domain (Amazon the company did not exist in 1990 when this RFC was written). I think it’s fair to say that the advice about avoiding domain(-like) names is obsolete today, but amazon would still be a poor name for a computer in a shared context today, precisely because so many people would first associate it with the megacorporation.

Of course giving individual names to any computer is obsolete today in many contexts. I don’t think any software job I’ve had since I graduated college ever involved an individually-named computer - even when we did need to spin up an AWS EC2 instance for something, we usually didn’t bother to give it a name besides the autogenerated one.

Mine are based on Monty Python characters, which is always fun when I share a demo on laptop, MajesticMoose

I name all of my computers after Horatio Nelson’s ships. (http://www.admiralnelson.info/Ships.htm) I’ve used most of the names so far, and am slightly concerned about the implications of finally naming one Victory.

I have fond memories of a job in a university lab helpdesk where most of the department machines were named after cartoon characters. The helpdesk computers were calvin and hobbes, which was appropriate.

The networked printers were all named after natural disasters, which was also appropriate.

Love the slice of history captured in this RFC.

When I was the CTO of Voxel.net in the late 90s, I named all our machines after LOTR… meriadoc & peregrine (load balancers), samwise, boromir, moria (firewall), mithril (mail server), probably others. No other real fans in the office (they were mostly pushing Gibson references) but then the first LOTR movie came out. It was delightful to see their expressions as characters and places were introduced and things clicked.

There are some organizational and geographical names that work

     fine.  These are exactly the ones that do not function well as
     domain names.  For example, amorphous names such as rivers,
     mythological places and other impossibilities are very
     suitable.  ("earth" is not yet a domain name.)

is funny in retrospect, now that .amazon is a top-level domain (Amazon the company did not exist in 1990 when this RFC was written). I think it’s fair to say that the advice about avoiding domain(-like) names is obsolete today, but amazon would still be a poor name for a computer in a shared context today, precisely because so many people would first associate it with the megacorporation.

Of course giving individual names to any computer is obsolete today in many contexts. I don’t think any software job I’ve had since I graduated college ever involved an individually-named computer - even when we did need to spin up an AWS EC2 instance for something, we usually didn’t bother to give it a name besides the autogenerated one.