James Galvin

Very big organisations tend to stick rigidly to a logical naming scheme made up of short location codes and numbers. That’s fair enough, since you need some structure when you have over a thousand servers on site. I personally would argue against it, because I have done my time as a lowly server technician at Intel. I was the guy who accidentally reboots the production server, IRSF24XHIJ1000MUP025 instead of the backup server, IRSF24XHIJ1001MUB025, costing the company thousands. Twice. I did suggest renaming the hostname on all production servers to include the string “_DONOTREBOOTTHIS_”, so that the new guy will think twice when as he’s typing the hostname into ssh/rdesktop to give it a kick.

But those of us on a small or medium-sized network don’t need to glean any information from the hostnames, and naming your devices (along with inserting witty comments in scripts) is about the only creative outlet a sysadmin has. Trying to think up a clever theme is not as easy as it sounds. There are rules.

Must be unique

You cannot copy anything from the last place you worked, you cannot rob them from someone else. Esatclear were my inspiration, bloaty.esatclear.ie, slimey.esatclear.ie, fester.esatclear.ie, some of their names if I remember correctly. Bloaty. The perfect hostname. Six letters, easy to pronounce, broad vowels, two strong syllables. I would laugh out loud whenever I saw someone connect to IRC with bloaty in the hostmask. I assume that bloaty was swallowed by the BT acquisition, and no longer exists, but this does not mean it is back on the market.

As tempting as it may be, you cannot resort to naming your servers:

• wiggum
• moleman
• flanders
• scorpio

The unfortunate reality is, the exact words “I scp’ed a backup of the database over to wiggum yesterday, should I restore it to flanders or to moleman?” have surely been asked at least twice in recent history, somewhere in the world.

Similarly, you can forget about anything relating to Star Wars, Tolkien, Battlestar Galactica. I would rule out sci-fi completely.

Should be grounded in geek culture or mythology

There are some exceptions to this rule:

• In-jokes
• Personal interests: If you’re a WWII buff, it is totally acceptable to go with a theme of American Generals of WWII, or Soviet tank nicknames

Must be pronouncable

And relatively easy to spell, too. There’s nothing worse than frantically trying to connect to iphigeneia or clytemnestra when some service is hung. I’ve heard of people using old discarded root passwords as hostnames. That’s a nice idea, but how are you going to tell someone to reboot x41BnnT994p in a hurry? Remember, a maximum of three syllables, ideally two, and as little room for misspellings as possible (“is that ist or est“)

Take, for example, Bond villains:

• zorin
• blofeld
• graves
• lechiffre
• goldfinger

While zorin and graves are definitely solid choices, blofeld and lechiffre are likely to cause some problems.

Other Examples

If you still lack the creative spark, this site will provide some inspiration.

Cheeses

• brie
• cheddar
• colby
• edam
• feta
• gorgonzola
• gouda
• mascarpone
• mozzarella
• parmesan
• roquefort
• stilton

Ciphers

• affine
• arnold
• atbash
• scytale
• vigenere
• elgamal
• anubis
• blowfish
• lucifer
• serpent
• skipjack

Chess World Champions

• capablanca
• euwe
• botvinnik
• smyslov
• tal
• petrosian
• spassky
• fischer
• karpov
• kasparov

Pirate Jargon

• avast
• plunder
• hearties
• matey
• arrr
• argh
• lubber
• ahoy
• bilgerat
• scurvy
• wench
• saltydog

Remember

It is not necessary to encompass all of your devices with one unifying theme. A series of loosely related themes is OK. For example, if you opt for an elephantine theme (dumbo, manny, ganesh, stampy) for your servers, then you might name your routers and firewalls after famous rats (nicodemus, roland, cluny, splinter).

Within a theme, it is also worth carefully considering that each device is given the most suitable name. In the criminally over-used Greek Mythology theme, you certainly wouldn’t want to waste an Olympian name like zeus on a lowly mp3 server. Unless it’s meant to be ironic… which would be the only excuse for using this theme to begin with.

The most important thing about your naming scheme is that it means something to you personally, or to the guys who would be using it. Nobody said it would be easy, deciding on your naming scheme requires work. At some point you might ask yourself “why am I wasting my time on this?” Just think of the cold winter days when food is scarce, would you rather ssh to proxy2 or to deathadder? Your legacy will live on in years to come, when the new guys are still trying to figure out which host does what.