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Ask HN: Which hostnames do you choose for your PCs?

2 points by zaphodias ↗ HN
I'm setupping a new personal laptop for the n-th time. Everytime gets harder and harder to choose a hostname...so I'm curious, how do you choose them?

I usually pick spaceship names from movies/shows, but I'm running out of ideas.

9 comments

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rzzzwilson
I've always used the Solar System as a source of names. Planet names for the main machines, with the names of moons for lesser devices like printers and scanners. The router and connection to the internet is called "Sun", of course.
EKSolutions
I've adopted a naming scheme after Pokemon. My main rig is called Raichu, whilst one of my dedicated servers is called Onix.

The main reasoning behind it was to ensure a large pool of names without having to reuse any from past machines.

jjgreen
My home network is *.fishnet, all hostnames are fish, laptops are flat fish; I type this on flounder.fishnet ...
tlb
Cities. There are lots of short, memorable city names. And they don't get old. (Fictional characters or band names tend to get tiresome after a while.)
ksaj
Back in the very early 90's, I ran a small ISP that fed UUCP news and email to BBS systems. As it grew, I had 3 servers. Toronto, where I live, has 3 major rivers, so the servers were named Humber, Rouge and Don.

My Raspberry Pis (of which I have quite a few) have patterned names. One set of them, for example are 'evil' names. EvilEye does monitoring stuff, EvilMind is the main host of a clusterHAT cluster, EvilGenius has a lot of my Lisp programming stuff on it, and so on. Since I don't purposely access the nodes on the pi cluster except to update them, I just give them boring host1 to host4 names.

As for laptops, I'm boring. My laptop is ksaj-laptop, my SO's is similarly named, and my old one that I rarely use anymore is crappylappy.

jrimbault
Periodic table. Rare gases for mobile devices. Metals for "non-mobile" devices. Most everything else is just random across the table, some of my preferred devices get "special" names like fantasy metals.
cpach
Some suggestions:

Greek gods / Roman gods / Other gods / Characters from the chronicles of Narnia / Characters from Marvel or DC / Characters from Donald Duck / Animal species / Plant species / Musical genres (e.g. electronic music)

Good luck :D