How do you name your computers?

These days just about every computer is networked, and that means they have to have a hostname. So how do you name yours? Assuming there’s no particular corporate standard you have to follow, do you make up a theme, or just give them random names?

At home we have lano and woodley.

At my girlfriend’s place, they’ve called them crunchie and munchie.

The company I use for web hosting names their servers after towns and cities around Australia.

At one job I had, we went Red Dwarf, and ended up with holly (main server), kryten (test server) and hudzen (temporary server).

At another job, we started on The Simpsons, with maggie, marge, homer… then moved onto Asterix, with getafix (very appropriate for a machine that needed patching) and obelix.

13 thoughts on “How do you name your computers?

  1. Tony

    We use Australian cricketers at work – Boonie has been retired, as has Warnie. My work is mainly on Healy.

  2. Stuart

    We have 2 naming strategies at work. Greek gods for development machines with Apollo, Zeus, Hades and Atlas.
    For production we have birds Pelican, Seagull, and Eagle.

  3. daniel Post author

    Was Warnie connected to a modem, and if so did it ever make unexplained calls or otherwise send messages?

    Is Hades overclocked?

    Assume you won’t be naming any production machines as Dodo.

    I should also add that in my current job, the hostnames are rigidly named by a corporate standard. Oh well.

  4. josh

    We use beers. Beers that start with a V are virtual servers. There are other themes, like imported and local.

    A company I worked for used parts of the anatonmy. Makes relating things easier, plus the names can kinda relate to the function of the box.

    I’ve heard of places that use wine varieties. Apparently, after a couple of hundred machines they were still going strong with names.

  5. Dino

    I’m boring.

    S=Server, W=Workstation, N=Notebook etc
    ???= 3 Char code for company
    ???= 3 char code for location
    ###= 3 digit unique number.

    So my servers are SXSLAKL001, SXSLAKL002 etc, my Notebooks are NXSLAKL001 and 3 etc

    But my sisters computers – I called them Wilma and Fred. Mainly because I called my Dad’s computers Pebbles and Bambam. And its nothing to do with my nickname – honest!

  6. Titel

    My home network is called Laboratory, since sis and I are both fans of Dexter’s Laboratory cartoon series (and we’re very much like DeeDee and Dexter in real life, too). Obviously, my computer was named Dexter and hers became DeeDee. But then we got a pair of laptops to be added in, Mom and Dad just didn’t sound right, so we ended up with two other characters from Dexter’s Laboratory, MajorGlory and Mandark. In case new PCs will be added, there’s a pool of names available: Mimi, Lilly, Unicorn, Timmy (remember Timmy, the termite that ate Dexter’s broken gadgets?)…

    Work is less fun. Workstations are named after an obscure global policy in my company, with a pseudo-random sequence of letters and digits assignated to my network logon. Servers get dull aliases, like 3-letter city abbreviation dash role name and counter, like cin-sql002 is the 2nd SQL production server in Cincinnati while bru-dev001 is the 1st development server in Bruxelles.

    Off-topic: This comment textbox is too wide and gets overlapped with the sidebar in IE6. Some CSS tweaking is needed, maybe even restructuring the theme’s DIVs a bit. Donate me some time and I could offer some suggestions, already implemented in my blog’s custom built theme 🙂

  7. gavin crosisca

    i proposed a network with 1990 collingwood premiership players. if it exceeded that number, we’d use 1958 collingwood premiership playres.

    i was told it was too parochial.

    they went for flower names.

    a jonquil is not a peter daicos!

  8. daniel Post author

    Titel: Noted. The site will get a revamp in the not-too-distant-future, and should fix that and other issues.

  9. barista

    My home LAN is the CAFFEINE network. So my PC/HDDs are CAPPUCCINO, MOCHA, LATTE, and MACCHIATO. My daughters PC is KIDDACCINO while my laptop is ESPRESSO and my small blue and silver 2GB USB memory stick is REDBULL. And me? Well, I’m the BARISTA obviously 😉

  10. Shiny Things

    I used to work for a religiously-affiliated organisation where our core servers were named after the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. This was fine until one of our senior staff started getting bounce messages from postmaster@DEATH; not long after that, they found out we’d named the computer lab boxes after the seven deadly sins. Whoops.

    Anyhow, they ordered us to rename them… we went for the periodic table and ended up with lab computers named “technetium” and “praesodymium”. (On the bright side, none of the users could spell the new hostnames, so they stopped using them to host Quake games.) But when I left three years later, we were all still calling the Win2K Server box “pestilence”.

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