My first thought was "all this goes out the window once you scale from pets to livestock," but my second thought was that, of course, we can automate these things, too.
eg human-readable-id[0] and some others I in a markdown page.[1]
The real thing that seems obsolete to me, even among pets, is the idea of "reuse a computer without reinstalling the OS". Even by 2000 a regular wipe seemed standard (admittedly often because Windows), but I wasn't around in 1990 ...
Currently I'm naming all my devices after moons, from largest to smallest. So far I haven't confused myself with `io.local`, though I think about it a lot. It probably helps that it's a device that's pretty isolated.
It wasn't a 5 or even 15 minutes process. It involved anywhere from 5 to 25 floppies, you need to sit and watch (at least occasionally) at the screen to change the disks, of course disk #13, which you used just fine yesterday, now has an unreadable sector and not only you need to procure a replacement but the computer you [tried to] reinstall is now surely non-operational.
I remember one of my first computers gifted to me with Windows 3.1(1?) on it and a bunch of games installed on it. I had a lot of fun with that computer.
One day I managed to screw up Windows so it wouldn't start anymore. Luckily they were kind enough to include a copy of Windows on floppy disks. One of the disks (7/13?) had an error on it, and I never was able to reinstall Windows. Damn you, GDI.DLL. I know it was always GDI.DLL it would fail on because I probably tried to reinstall it ten times, hoping for a different outcome.
Back to DOS for me. At least I learned batch scripting...
For reference, I do remember (admittedly mostly from retroactive poking around):
For Windows 95, boot floppies were generally assumed to be needed (El Torito was only invented in late 1994), though the CD was usually used for the main installation.
For Windows 98, boot from CD was widely assumed to work at least on machines that came with it.
"Livestock not pets" reflects the values of the surveillance industry, which needs scale-everything architectures as a result of treating users as livestock to be farmed. My machines each serve specific purposes, and I have a lovely cat. I don't need my own copy of AWS nor a pack of dogs.
I remember when the original "pets vs cattle" viral post took off in the tech world, it wasn't long before folks from the farming world started hearing about it and saying, "actually, that's not how you treat cattle..."
I used to say "writing software ain't like digging ditches; you don't get steady progress out for steady human-hours in" until I had a client who dug a lot of ditches. They informed me that ditch-digging also goes in fits and starts.
Ever since, I've had to say "writing software is like digging ditches."
Although, truth be told, ever since then I simply tell this whole story.
There was a computer lab at my school where all the servers were named after rivers. "li" was very popular, while "euphrates" rarely had anyone else on it.
Did everyone skip class the day they taught about the tab key?
Every computer, every directory, every file, every command, every option and argument is maximum three keystrokes long: the first character, the second character and the tab key :-)
I would say that usually you do. But in hindsight, that's a behavior that came with SSH (via known_hosts and ssh/config). So back in the rlogin days, yeah, autocomplete of hostnames was not common.
I use ship and colony names from Battlestar Galactica. Big x86 servers are battlestars, DRADIS for firewalls, NAS' get the colony names. All the ARM servers and SBCs get Cylon names. Personal devices get civilian ship names.
This is what I do with my homelab too. My gateway is called sol, everything else orbits around it. Furthest out is an Intel NUC at a relatives place with Wireguard access called Pluto.
But more importantly, since a HN post about an RFC defined hostname for home devices I've started using the home.arpa suffix for all of them.
I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a computer called “gandalf”.
Markforged, a company that makes 3D printers, uses a string of two words as a unique name for each printer sold. You never have to refer to a serial number. I think the second word is always an animal, so your printer might be called “sleeping giraffe”.
A local Unix users’ group once had a server named “morgoth”. I guess in general the Middle-earth legendarium is a nigh-inexhaustible source of cool computer names.
wandb (ML data tracking) generates random run names using a similar strategy. Also something we implemented at a past company for our networked spectrometers. They'd get "element_adjective" as a hostname.
Another time, we called our drone onboard computers after the Valkyries. There are enough to go around and many of them are short and can be anglicised (e.g. herja, hrist, hildr, hrund).
Most of my devices are named after entities from Neuromancer, though I'm surprised how few people I know that have read it.
> "Most of my devices are named after entities from Neuromancer, though I'm surprised how few people I know that have read it."
As a young "hacker" way back in "ye olde days" of gaming, I played the computer game [0] which fortunately came with a paperback copy of the book at a time when I was an avid reader of sci-fi.
I guess it matches the tagline: "RFC documents contain technical specifications and organizational notes for the Internet", here: https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/
But I'm still more used to seeing strict specifications in this format...
This is an Informational RFC, there’s a plenty of them and because they aren’t specifications, there’s no particular level of rigor expected (April Fools RFCs are Informational, for one!)
if you're ever having trouble coming up with a name, head over to Wookiepedia. no shortage of star wars planet names.
I usually go for a name from whatever book I'm reading at the time. currently have hogfather (terry pratchett), ozzie (peter f hamilton, void trilogy), sparver (alaistair reynolds - prefect dreyfus novels), deathandgravity (iain m banks - culture series). I'd love to use more ship names from the culture books but they're all too long.
I'm going through the list of US presidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_Unit... and take their first names (if there are severeal with the same first name I only take it once) in order from oldest towards today. The latest computer is called Abraham, so there still many left before I have to call one of my computers Donald.
I use locations from Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. My PC is a black tower, so I called it Isengard. My fair MacBook Air is Valinor. The Raspberry Pi is Bree.
I've been using names of chemical elements. They're nice since they come with abbreviations and associated numbers. So if there's host 'gallium', you know that it can also be referenced as 'ga' and that it's local IP address is going to be something like 192.168.1.31.
About a year into my first IT role we installed a lot of networking infra into schools. Every school, bar none, had their network infrastructure named after characters from Blake's 7 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blake%27s_7)
The domain controller would inevitably be named Orac. So much so that we set them as defaults in the routers we installed.
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[ 2.1 ms ] story [ 133 ms ] threadhttps://github.com/rbanffy/nsaname
eg human-readable-id[0] and some others I in a markdown page.[1]
0. https://www.npmjs.com/package/human-readable-ids
1. https://github.com/grantcarthew/awesome-unique-id
Currently I'm naming all my devices after moons, from largest to smallest. So far I haven't confused myself with `io.local`, though I think about it a lot. It probably helps that it's a device that's pretty isolated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_natural_satellites and sort by "mean radius", or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_b... and filter by color manually.
It wasn't a 5 or even 15 minutes process. It involved anywhere from 5 to 25 floppies, you need to sit and watch (at least occasionally) at the screen to change the disks, of course disk #13, which you used just fine yesterday, now has an unreadable sector and not only you need to procure a replacement but the computer you [tried to] reinstall is now surely non-operational.
One day I managed to screw up Windows so it wouldn't start anymore. Luckily they were kind enough to include a copy of Windows on floppy disks. One of the disks (7/13?) had an error on it, and I never was able to reinstall Windows. Damn you, GDI.DLL. I know it was always GDI.DLL it would fail on because I probably tried to reinstall it ten times, hoping for a different outcome.
Back to DOS for me. At least I learned batch scripting...
For Windows 95, boot floppies were generally assumed to be needed (El Torito was only invented in late 1994), though the CD was usually used for the main installation.
For Windows 98, boot from CD was widely assumed to work at least on machines that came with it.
Yeah, my uncle had a small herd of cows and they all had names.
Ever since, I've had to say "writing software is like digging ditches."
Although, truth be told, ever since then I simply tell this whole story.
There was a computer lab at my school where all the servers were named after rivers. "li" was very popular, while "euphrates" rarely had anyone else on it.
Every computer, every directory, every file, every command, every option and argument is maximum three keystrokes long: the first character, the second character and the tab key :-)
https://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Alphabetical_Ship_List
But more importantly, since a HN post about an RFC defined hostname for home devices I've started using the home.arpa suffix for all of them.
Among much of the advice here, that one hasn't scaled too well.
https://www.rowsdowr.com/2013/03/07/leonard-nimoys-pet-pad-e...
Markforged, a company that makes 3D printers, uses a string of two words as a unique name for each printer sold. You never have to refer to a serial number. I think the second word is always an animal, so your printer might be called “sleeping giraffe”.
Another time, we called our drone onboard computers after the Valkyries. There are enough to go around and many of them are short and can be anglicised (e.g. herja, hrist, hildr, hrund).
Most of my devices are named after entities from Neuromancer, though I'm surprised how few people I know that have read it.
As a young "hacker" way back in "ye olde days" of gaming, I played the computer game [0] which fortunately came with a paperback copy of the book at a time when I was an avid reader of sci-fi.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromancer_(video_game)
I guess it matches the tagline: "RFC documents contain technical specifications and organizational notes for the Internet", here: https://www.ietf.org/standards/rfcs/
But I'm still more used to seeing strict specifications in this format...
I usually go for a name from whatever book I'm reading at the time. currently have hogfather (terry pratchett), ozzie (peter f hamilton, void trilogy), sparver (alaistair reynolds - prefect dreyfus novels), deathandgravity (iain m banks - culture series). I'd love to use more ship names from the culture books but they're all too long.
I went with Egyptian deities for a long time. Lots of simple names - ra, set, nut, isis.
obsidian, jade, peridot, diamond, sapphire...
Oolong, jasmine, tetley, amgoorie, liptons, bushells, dilmah, twinings ...
personally I use musicians. my primary desktop, whatever the actual hardware, has been “coltrane” since the eighties
stilnox ivadel zolpidem
The domain controller would inevitably be named Orac. So much so that we set them as defaults in the routers we installed.
A generational thing.
I use names of painters I like at home: Goya, Mondrian, Repin.