Hi fellow selfhosters!
What hostnames do you use for your systems and services?
And maybe why if it’s an interesting story.
I’ll start:
Steam Deck: krax
Smartphone: krix (once I get LineageOS installed again)
MiniPC: krux
Reserved for future use: krex & krox
Creative, I know. 😅 The names have no deeper meaning. The x comes from Linux. That’s it.
I know some of you use god names of certain pantheons, such as Thor. But I find that boring as a lot of people are doing that.
Now let your pants down and tell me all about
your embarrassing host names!
I’ve gone through lots of themes. These days it’s mostly where things are or what they are for. Topshelf, closet, code lives on monkey, work laptop is named work. I’ve had more fun themes but the novelty wore off.
For my ProxMox server stuff I went with Lord of the Rings. The idea being the servers would be locations and the VMs would characters.
So right now my main server is Rivendell, and my PiHole on it is Gandalf (“You shall not pass!” Heehee eventually he’ll have OPNSense too…)
If I get HomeAssistant at some point, obviously that’ll be Samwise!
My Klipper VM for 3D printing is Celebrimbor, and the individual printers are named after various deities or myth figures of crafting/smithing/creativity like Brigid and Eitri.
For my client devices, I name my personal hardware after BattleTech mechs and that works well. It’s intuitive because I can line up various roles and weight classes.
So my main desktop is Timberwolf, and my laptops are named after light mechs like Kitfox or Mistlynx.
Phones and tablets I don’t really care about, they usually just name themselves after their model anyway. :)
I mostly use battlestar galactica ship names for my own hardware, but it’s been mixed with boring ‘<function>.mydomain.foo’ names as well. I should rename a bunch of stuff around and include them in my DNS.
I just memorise the IPs lmao. then again I only have 1 or 2 hosts up on my network ever
I recently de-embarrassed my hostnames. I went with names that are one step removed from being dead obvious. Feels nice having descriptive, but not uncreative, names for everything
- Custom built desktop pc: Studio
- Home theater PC: Theater
- Server: Gamut (this was Nexus until I ran into bs regarding the TLD preload list in web browsers… had to go with a non-tld name)
- Everything else: Based off the model. For example, my Asus Vivobook S 15 is just “Vivobook”, etc
Uhg y’all actually have creative names, here are mine:
My homelab - Pero-base
My main PC - Pero-main
My laptop - Pero-portable
My other server - Pero-webI swear I’m not a narcissist.
Nah, just a huge fan of barley tea.
Y’all are too creative for me… I have:
- poweredge-r520-0
- poweredge-t620-0
- poweredge-t620-1
- pi4-0
- pi3b-0
- pi3b-1
- pi3b-2
- pi3b-3
- vostro-3525-0
- ideapad-c340-0
Finally someone who actually uses a Vostro. Always found that name unreasonably funny.
I have to ask, why start with 0? I never understood this with infrastructure. I would do something like 00000 if I did numbers so it would be easy to sort, but I always started with 1. I’m just curious.
First non negative integer so easy for computer to display.
I only really use zero in networking names to correspond with an IPv4 address that ends with dot zero.
I think it’s just what you’re used to. Like counting bottom to top in teleco versus counting top to bottom in IT.
One possibility could be because in conventional “computer counting” in (most) coding languages, it starts at zero. Like if I make an array of things
[monke, chimp, peanut]monke would be
[0]chimp would be
[1]peanut would be
[2]Once I learned about this concept I started naming enumerated things from 0 usually just to keep a kind of consistency. Maybe I think if it’s a habit, I won’t make those mistakes as often with code. I dunno. :p
Use Lua, it uses one-based arrays. This is nice for a few reasons:
- last element is array[length]
- zero can be reserved for the type (especially nice for representing XML: 0 = node name, 1-N = children, named table entries = attributes)
- very rarely see
+ 1and- 1in my code
It feels wrong coming from C, but it’s actually really nice, especially since the reasons C does it don’t apply (i.e. index is just a memory offset).
This is basically how I do it too.
I used to be more creative but then I got in the habit of running more servers and swapping hardware more frequently so it got harder to remember what hardware I was actually connecting to. Now they get hardware based names and everything else is named by service-based Ansible roles.
pretty new setup but so far I’ve got
symmetra - synology dsm (nas)
junkrat - intel nuc main serverneed to name my desktop/laptop now and maybe networking gear. thinking ramattra for the router and zenyatta for the bridge
I named mine after different Half Life characters: GMAN- Server FREEMAN- Main Gaming Rig ALYX- Laptop
And so on…
I use characters from whichever book I’m reading at the time. Examples:
- Arya: From ASOIAF, a small but powerful Ultrabook
- Cthulhu: From HP Lovecraft, a huge 17" laptop
- Horus: From the Horus Heresy books, A powerful laptop
- Binky: Death’s white horse from discworld, a white desktop
- Peaches: A rat that always carries a book with her. My home server
my local hostnames are all David Bowie related. I have: outside (my laptop) blackstar (server 1) starman (server 2) heros (desktop1)
I don’t have a whole network setup like the rest of you guys, but I’ve been naming my desktop pc’s SHODAN ever since I built my first one. Secondary/partner’s pc is named XERXES. I’ll probably never change them.
AI from fiction:
HAL M.O.T.H.E.R AM Jarvis
deleted by creator
My first computer job was at a college that used names from ancient history and mythology. So I mostly still do that. Medea is my plex server. Zeus and Hera are the hosts for docker and VMs. Heimdall is the router.
The only break in the pattern is my storage, which is currently NASC and NASD…
Oh and my personal machine used to be HAL_9000 (complete with wallpaper and theme sounds) but now I just name it “box.”
