Elder sysadmins: share your ridiculous server naming schemes.
I'll go first: Dune.
Mailservers named after guild navigators, all-purpose utility server that changed identities all the time was "Scytale," 40 DHCP servers all named "Duncan Idaho," etc.
I was subject to a suite of machines in a lab in college all named for mountain ranges in India, which 22-year-old me could not pronounce, much less spell.
I knew a company using only 8 letters French animal names. A couple of those names are also used to name sexual position like which adds a little bit of something to maintenance tasks
worked one place where the devs kept changing all the lab machine names every day or two because they didn't like the scheme. got so bad it's why i now know the NATO phonetic alphabet (alpha bravo charlie etc) because the director decreed that the lab would name all test machines using it. we got to tango before i left.
I used to use Star Trek ship names. But eventually I went to a really dull naming scheme because anyone that isn't a Trek nerd doesn't understand the difference between different Enterprise registration numbers.
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. My last workstation (which I had for about seven years) was "Wowbagger" after the immortal dude trying to insult every sentient in alphabetical order.
The router I retired yesterday was "Jeltz" after the commander of the fleet that destroyed Earth.
Below is a list of some of the 'millions of worlds' mentioned in the Dune novels. For information on important stars in the Dune novels refer to the Stars page.
Most of the servers in my college years (small nerdy school, early 90s) were Norse gods and other associated mythical creatures. I remember Sif, Mimir, Frigga, Fenris, and Loki for sure, but there were others.
Oh, let's see.. I've seen all sorts across the companies I've worked for. But my personal servers were all named after Norse gods. Odin, Heimdall, Fafnir, etc.
As a PhD student, I named the workstations in our research group after HP Lovecraft entities. The professor was not happy to have a machine named nyarlathotep.
DNS names as an inventory system. Nine letters in hyphened blocks of three to denote location, function, and os followed by two digits in case of multiple hosts. Examples
Human bones. Cubitus, humerus, tibia, fibula, femur, radius, ulna, etc.
Initially hands/fingers were LBs or front end machines, with thorax bones being core stuff. We fucked it up early enough and then it was just an txt file on the jump host to keep track of which bones were still available, and a shell script to ping-check the txt file.
@SiteRelEnby "types of alcoholic drink" is actually one I did on my personal fleet. Including...
apple (wine) beer booze chardonnay flirtini kahlua keg (OK, adjacent, but it was a Compaq Proliant 5000R, and thus fitting) margarita midori port rum vodka wine zinfandel
I'm probably missing some; this was from an old asset management database (that it still boggles my mind that I wrote 😂).
high profile failures. spruce-goose, titanic, and vasa were a few examples. Later, when we couldn't think of any more of those, we pivoted to shipwrecks. Optimistic bunch we were there...
in the 80s my uni named machines after pubs, which meant that we had to go and find them for SCIENCE - I'd never have known about or visited "Sturburst" otherwise.
Boringly, coffee and tea varieties more recently for me or machines on my networks.
The computers at an ISP I worked at were all named after figures from Greco-Roman myth. The NNTP server's name was aeneas, and the man who looked after it, who hated NNTP with a burning passion as all news admins do, used to call it "anus" in meetings, much to our manager's chagrin. "Any other business?" "Anus needs yet another disk upgrade." "It's 'aeneas', Steve." "I said what I said."
I named mine after “Babylon 5” races and characters. When I started virtualizing I switched to fictional characters in simulated environments (neo, runciter, cobb, etc.) Then I got old and started naming VMs/instances/containers after what they do.
university was birds, from then it was Simpsons characters, then astronomical objects. Currently have a client that has run out of elements and moved onto greek letters. Everything else is dull old location-function-number type schemes LON-SQL-023 or so forth. Often clients will use a string of characters that means something to them but to me is akin to a complex password AWELKRDSH01A
a, b, c, d for the mainframe cells… the middleware layer is also a, b, c, d, but they don’t correspond to the MF cells. Other machines are all things like bank62, bank74, bank53, etc. There is no canonical list of what they are for, we are just expected to know.
@neirbowj I would like to add to this that, at least in DNS, subdomains do exist, so why not use them to organize your stuff. They are not part of the hostname but the domain name is already used for access anyways.
Medicines. I forget most of the machines and the details, but our internal license server ended up running on "viagra". Lots of laughs, very funny... and then we constantly had license renewal attempts getting dropped and blocked 🤦♀️
The last amusing set I came across were named after characters from Viz magazine - in particular the jump box between office/lab networks had two interfaces, and routed a lot of stuff, so San and Tray it was (one for each i/f). Happy days.
My personal kit is South Park oriented, main server Timmy-iii (I killed the earlier incarnations of course).
at my first job, which pre-dates The Cloud(TM) by several years, the sysadmins used trees for servers (ash, birch, oak, etc). users got to name their machines and most of the users wanted clouds (contested enough that I recall a “cumulostratus” and “cirronimbus”, which may not be exactly correct but are the right level of Extremely Cloud)
- Servers were characters - Battery-backed power supplies were planets - switches were x-wings, making squadrons per building - the label maker was the Force
Fictional servants or butlers, often from pop culture.
Approximately, human ones for workstations ("poppins", "ruth", "benson", etc.) and non-human ones for servers ("marvin", "genie", etc.) Our log aggregator and configuration-manager host is "gort".
When I came on board years ago, by some miracle "baldrick" was still available, so I took it for my laptop.
Forgot this gem: I worked at a place where the domain was dash.net. I threw a wiki up at hostname “dot-dash.dash.net”.
Just so when someone verbally asked how to do a thing, I could reply "The docs for that are up on dot dash dash dot dash dot net.” Again, young and stupid, but that gave me lots of joy.
AFS servers are named after maritime disasters. My personal machines are named after either swords or horses (depending on which domain they're in). Authoritative name servers are named after the stars in Orion's belt, except for one that used to be called `life` and has now been through a cycle of reincarnation (on different hardware) as `death`, `rebirth`, and currently `new-life`. We used to do cartoon characters, but one line was Swiss ski resorts instead.
Cars. Planets. Locations in Terry Brooks’ “Shannara” world (surprise). None of these are particularly ridiculous; but what IS ridiculous is the naming convention that infosec at a former employer mandated, which called Cisco firewalls “netgear” and Palo Alto firewalls “pix” because - and I am not making this up - they insisted this would somehow confuse attackers and improve security.
[ edit: guess who was actually confused on the regular? ]
For a long time my systems were all named with (long-declassified) code words from cold war projects: aquatone, oxcart, hexagon, corona, etc.
I mean, a source for unique names intentionally chosen at random is pretty handy. It did tend to nearly provoke a heart attack in folks who had previously been in that world, though.
Back when we had pets, rather than cattle, I named machines after Goon Show characters (Bloodnok, Eccles, Minnie, Bluebottle, Seagoon etc). I was anc@crun for many years at Sun. Previously someone named Suns after moon goddesses and we had one called Mnemosyne - which was a good spelling test. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goon…
early on in my career the server admins had them all named after LOTR characters. My previous job had them named after local parks. My home network had everything named after Transformers before I got lazy.
Once when it was my turn to name the servers I named them after the Finger Lakes in NY. Everybody who ever had to type “Canandaigua” or “Skaneateles” is probably still cursing my name... as they adjust their wrist brace.
No shortage of oddball words to use. Confusing AF, too. Is dilithium the NAS because we always need more, or the time server because it’s critical to warpcore, the DC.
Thankfully corporate came in and put an end to that nonsense.
Matrix characters and LotR ones. For the latest, I've tried to stick to the character personnality: our little NAS with big storage and big RAM was Gimli, our oldest was Gandalf.
All devices with a fixed location get city names (Osgiliath, Orthanc, Bree, Rivendell, ...). All mobile devices (laptops, mobiles, ...) get named after some named entity (Theoden, Smaug, ... no matter on wich side of the story). All guest devices become orcs and uruk-hai.
Fi, infosec-aspected 🏳️⚧️
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •oh I like that tho.
One place did DC comics refs; another place I know has projects with Futurama based names.
Dan
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •WinterKnight
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Dave Copeland :ruby:
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Kilteer
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Kevin Boyd
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •I'm currently naming servers after parts of You Only Move Twice.
Scorpio.
Hammock.
Globex.
Viss
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •I've seen, in my career:
- transformers & decepticons
- greek gods
- roman gods
- disney characters
- constellations
- planets
and you can very much tell who are the 'academics' because they almost always go for the greek/roman gods and star/constellation names.
at twitter it was all birds, and at some point they ran out, so they started using cartoon birds
Jima
in reply to Viss • • •Viss
in reply to Jima • • •The Doctor
in reply to Jima • • •Jima
in reply to The Doctor • • •Jason Haar :laserkiwi:
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •WowSuchCyber
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Paul_IPv6
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •south park. tolkien. greek liturgical terms.
worked one place where the devs kept changing all the lab machine names every day or two because they didn't like the scheme. got so bad it's why i now know the NATO phonetic alphabet (alpha bravo charlie etc) because the director decreed that the lab would name all test machines using it. we got to tango before i left.
Travis Bell
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •WowSuchCyber
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •nsfw
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Daniel Taylor
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •I've used elements, geometric shapes, and pop culture references at various times
But as we go to more single-purpose systems I've become more fond of simple descriptive names (function+ordinal+location)
Merlin.2160p.BDRip.x265.10bit
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Ryan Lounsbury
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •xchange
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Ryan Castellucci
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. My last workstation (which I had for about seven years) was "Wowbagger" after the immortal dude trying to insult every sentient in alphabetical order.
The router I retired yesterday was "Jeltz" after the commander of the fleet that destroyed Earth.
Ryan Castellucci
in reply to Ryan Castellucci • • •🇺🇦 haxadecimal
in reply to Ryan Castellucci • • •My managed switches are named after evil organizations. Fictitious, except for Smersh.
Nemo
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Stefan Schmidt
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •@socketwench bad word replacements from SciFi: narf, frell, frak, tanj
characters from Lexx the dark zone: kai, zev, 790
dune planets: ix, kaitain, richese, tleilax, corrin, crompton, ginaz, ishkal, ishia, junction, lampadas, rossak dune.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_p…
Tokyo special wards: meguro, chiyoda, shinjuku, minato, taito, koto, shinagawa, setagaya, shibuya, nerima
and otemachi - liked the scenic routing to ns-wide.wide.ad.jp from Europe, one of the NS for kame.net
List of planets
Contributors to Dune Wiki (Fandom, Inc.)Ingvar
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Fear and Tooting in Las Vegas
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •George Dinwiddie
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •My brother, ex navy hospital corpsman, once named the machines at his IBM lab after infectious diseases.
Some people were upset because they couldn't remember how to spell them.
David Nash
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Paul_IPv6
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •one place i worked, all workstations were named after things that had fought godzilla in the movies.
the winning name was "bambi".
XenoPhage
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Nat Pryce
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Matthew Flint
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Mine are named after characters from the 1970s BBC comedy “Porridge”.
At university (30 years ago, omg) our unix boxes were named after scotch whiskies.
Dan Turner
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •controlc
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •DNS names as an inventory system. Nine letters in hyphened blocks of three to denote location, function, and os followed by two digits in case of multiple hosts. Examples
TOR-WEB-WIN01
NYK-MAIL-LIN02
I hated it.
furicle
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Sebastian Lauwers
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Human bones. Cubitus, humerus, tibia, fibula, femur, radius, ulna, etc.
Initially hands/fingers were LBs or front end machines, with thorax bones being core stuff. We fucked it up early enough and then it was just an txt file on the jump host to keep track of which bones were still available, and a shell script to ping-check the txt file.
Site Reliability Enby🏳️⚧️🏁🔦📈🐺👗😷
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •pasta la vida
in reply to Site Reliability Enby🏳️⚧️🏁🔦📈🐺👗😷 • • •Jima
in reply to Site Reliability Enby🏳️⚧️🏁🔦📈🐺👗😷 • • •@SiteRelEnby "types of alcoholic drink" is actually one I did on my personal fleet. Including...
apple (wine)
beer
booze
chardonnay
flirtini
kahlua
keg (OK, adjacent, but it was a Compaq Proliant 5000R, and thus fitting)
margarita
midori
port
rum
vodka
wine
zinfandel
I'm probably missing some; this was from an old asset management database (that it still boggles my mind that I wrote 😂).
noahm
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Grant Slater
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Johan Wärlander 🦀
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Muppets.. "bigbird" etc.
At least before more structured approaches were adopted, and we were all in on 6 letters (for country, city, purpose) + 2-3 numbers.
Andreas 'count' Kotes
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •DamonHD
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •in the 80s my uni named machines after pubs, which meant that we had to go and find them for SCIENCE - I'd never have known about or visited "Sturburst" otherwise.
Boringly, coffee and tea varieties more recently for me or machines on my networks.
Flavien Scheurer
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Caterpillar Belgium used to have servers named after... Belgium beers.
They never ran out of names.
Benjamin D. Hutchins
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •oscarsclaws :donor:
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Jered Floyd
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •The Secretbatcave
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •@madpilot one place was computers from movies (it was a film shop, so ok)
Another was death metal bands. (When the really important server, megadeath, actually died, some eyebrows were raised)
A good naming scheme was all workstations were named after towns and villages in that country.
Matt Hardy
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Jon Rowe
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •silverwizard
in reply to Corey Quinn • •Abbot, Costello, Wayne, Shuster, Poettering
Sam Easterby-Smith
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •John W. O'Brien
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •How about a server naming scheme that was divised to encode about six different attributes of the server. Roughly speaking:
- internal client name
- service name (or maybe the project code name under which it was deployed)
- role
- instance
- OS
- sequence number
In addition to being unpronounceable and only barely comprehensible, it's like a case study in "Falsehoods sysadmins believe about servers".
Stefan Schmidt
in reply to John W. O'Brien • • •Jennine Townsend
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Phil Ashby 🍵
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •The last amusing set I came across were named after characters from Viz magazine - in particular the jump box between office/lab networks had two interfaces, and routed a lot of stuff, so San and Tray it was (one for each i/f). Happy days.
My personal kit is South Park oriented, main server Timmy-iii (I killed the earlier incarnations of course).
yomimono, still on earth
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •CynBlogger™️-47NotMyPrez
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •silverwizard
in reply to CynBlogger™️-47NotMyPrez • •Michael Brown reshared this.
Narayan Desai
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Corey Quinn
in reply to Narayan Desai • • •Narayan Desai
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •It wasn't my scheme. It also doesn't help that it was used for a server migration.
I still think this was preferable to the celtic mythology scheme another of my coworkers favored.
It was the 90's.
tuban_muzuru
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •toadjaune
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Star Wars :
- Servers were characters
- Battery-backed power supplies were planets
- switches were x-wings, making squadrons per building
- the label maker was the Force
Bob 🇺🇲♒🐧🪖
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Andrew Reid
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Fictional servants or butlers, often from pop culture.
Approximately, human ones for workstations ("poppins", "ruth", "benson", etc.) and non-human ones for servers ("marvin", "genie", etc.) Our log aggregator and configuration-manager host is "gort".
When I came on board years ago, by some miracle "baldrick" was still available, so I took it for my laptop.
Old Man in the Shoe
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Bill Childers
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Forgot this gem: I worked at a place where the domain was dash.net. I threw a wiki up at hostname “dot-dash.dash.net”.
Just so when someone verbally asked how to do a thing, I could reply "The docs for that are up on dot dash dash dot dash dot net.” Again, young and stupid, but that gave me lots of joy.
Rob O :verified:
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Cranberry Sauce is People!!!
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Colloquial names for _Felis concolor_:
panther, painter, puma, catamount, cougar, mountain_lion, florida_panther
Garrett Wollman
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Marc W.
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Scott Francis
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Cars. Planets. Locations in Terry Brooks’ “Shannara” world (surprise). None of these are particularly ridiculous; but what IS ridiculous is the naming convention that infosec at a former employer mandated, which called Cisco firewalls “netgear” and Palo Alto firewalls “pix” because - and I am not making this up - they insisted this would somehow confuse attackers and improve security.
[ edit: guess who was actually confused on the regular? ]
curtosis
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •For a long time my systems were all named with (long-declassified) code words from cold war projects: aquatone, oxcart, hexagon, corona, etc.
I mean, a source for unique names intentionally chosen at random is pretty handy. It did tend to nearly provoke a heart attack in folks who had previously been in that world, though.
jeffeb3
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Our company kept making the new systems sound faster and stronger. It went from animals to mythical animals to godlike beings.
I decided to reset and named them after slow animals like sloth, snail, slug, and turtle.
I hoped the next set would be just a little faster. But they went back to the gods.
nesv
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •planets from Firefly!
Sihnon, Whitefall, Ariel, Beaumonde...
Adrian Cockcroft
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •BBC Radio show broadcast between 1950 and 1960
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Hypolite Petovan
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Jeremy Dennis
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Molly B
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •djb
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Jenn Dolari
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •@socketwench - My Main PC in the livingroom is Din. The office is Nayru. The laptop os Farore. My phone s Navi.
Why yes, I bought the Zelda game that comes out tonight, why do you ask?
Ichinin ✅🎯🙄
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Was a long time ago i worked as a sysadmin, but: Southpark.
Big fat Dell server was cartman, webserver was Kenny, BDC was kyle.
If the webserver crashed (IIS 1.0) - "Omg they killed Kenny!"
genehack
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Stephen Spencer
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Mathaetaes
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •star trek.
No shortage of oddball words to use. Confusing AF, too. Is dilithium the NAS because we always need more, or the time server because it’s critical to warpcore, the DC.
Thankfully corporate came in and put an end to that nonsense.
Eriatolc
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Nathan Schneider
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •What is the "new infrastructure" and why are we moving to it?
May First Documentation WikiZiggy the Hamster 🐹🌻
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •good albums (as picked by the selector)
We had at least:
all-eyez-on-me
in-through-the-out-door
lateralus
bad-hair-day
smash
poodle-hat
southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
moving-pictures
eye-in-the-sky
i-wish-my-brother-george-was-here
swass
as-nasty-as-they-wanna-be
americana
vulgar-display-of-power
peace-sells
ride-the-lightning
rust-in-peace
and-justice-for-all
ignition
rush-2112
millennium
jagged-little-pill
the-presidents-of-the-united-states-of-america
Arnim Sommer 🇪🇺
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •Firewalls scylla and charybdis...
Piiieps & Brummm
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •LotR.
All devices with a fixed location get city names (Osgiliath, Orthanc, Bree, Rivendell, ...).
All mobile devices (laptops, mobiles, ...) get named after some named entity (Theoden, Smaug, ... no matter on wich side of the story).
All guest devices become orcs and uruk-hai.
realityCzar
in reply to Corey Quinn • • •