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.
Huh. I thought for sure someone else would be using my scheme.
LAN computers are all Tolkien swords: sting, orcrist, gurthang, glamdring, etc. If I run out of swords, I’ll start adding other weapons: aeglost, the spear; dailir, the arrow. We don’t get a lot of named battle axes, which I always thought weird; I’d think dwarves of all people would forge legendary axes, and certainly name them.
My WiFi and VPN networks are forests in Middle Earth: fangorn, bindbole, dimholt, lothlorien, etc. The only exception is my LAN itself which is… “lan”. Because short.
My cloud VPSes are named after Greek Titans: hyperion, phaethusa, tethys, etc.
Mobile devices have whatever names they come with, because they’re so ephemeral.
In the past, I used Gimli’s family tree for server names. My main server was called “Thorin”. I think I had used Thrain and Gloin.
These days I use Union generals from the civil war:
Sherman - NAS, media server, nextcloud. Thomas - reverse proxy, adguard1. Ellsworth - arr stack. Sheridan - backup server. dockerhost01 - because naming your servers after their function makes a lot more sense.
Oh, that’s good.
Middle Earth is a great source for this stuff, b/c Tolkien filled out the world like a historian.
I like your schema. I’ve used something similar. My hosts have always been sci-fi space/time ships/stations, user accounts are characters from or Captain’s of said vessels. Over the years I’ve had a TARDIS, Serenity, Moya, Out of Bands II, Galactica, Millennium Falcon, Rocinante, etc. It’s usually whatever I happen to be discovering or binging at the time I setup the machine. For nearly a decade the TARDIS was my server/NAS because it was bigger on the inside that survived through several generations of smaller devices like laptops and raspberry Pi’s named after smaller lighter vessels like Serenity and Rocinante.
Thanks! I’ve learned in jobs over the years that there are two good ways to choose names:
“Sci fi starships” is a great one! Lots of source material there; the categories basically fall out by themselves. That’s a great choice.