Selfhosted

Names of Greek letters.

Alpha, Beta, Delta, Epsilon...

Characters from the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. Zaphod, Prosser, Arthur, slartibartfast etc

VPS/servers after particles. Quark, Boson, Hadron etc

I had painted an old Lenovo desktop blue to use as a home server. Named it blueberry. Recently upgraded servers using a black case. Named it blackberry.

I have a weird one: years ago I called one machine "nudl" (like using one's noodle but with a weird spelling). Now I've got a few different nudls, a strudl, a dudl, and I think there's a pudl in the closet somewhere.

Fun fact: When AOL was still operating in Germany, internal servers in their network were named after characters / things from Asterix comics, like Asterix, Obelix, Idefix, Miraculix and even Hinkelstein (menhir). When Telecom Italia bought them up they unfortunately got rid of all these and replaced them with standard corpo server names. Source: I worked there.

I used to invent "funny" names, but at some point it became a chore and I also found I'm forgetting some names or spelling when I need it.

Call me boring, but doing enterprise system admin jobs for years I recently started to adopt functional naming convention.

This is what I have now: [location code][OS code][type vm/ct][environment code][workload][index]

So the first production DB linux VM in my primary Los Angeles location will be named LA1LVMPDB1 And my second test Nextcloud container hosted in the same location will be named LA2LCTTNC2.

I still have to invent short names for workload, which is harder for specialized containers, but overall this makes it all more manageable.

I used to work in the GRASP lab at Penn, and my predecessor there was John Bradley of xv fame. He had started naming all the machines after fish.

When I got there I continued the practice, naming some tiny computers being used for mini robots after different types of goldfish.

In my current job, years ago, I managed a group of Linux servers, and I named them after Demons (Lucifer, Asmodeus, Azrael, Beelzebub, etc.).

At this point, there is a specific naming convention in use where I'm at, and the name is limited to identifying organization, application, and server type.

At my first job/internship it was fish names (they were dev/qa servers so wiped almost daily): Crappie, Bluegill, Walleye, Marlin, etc.

Current job is medical so it's all professional (i.e gr01sec02, gr02sccm01)

At home I've got a couple of naming schemes for different device types.:

Phones: i-telleuwat(last 4 of the number)
PCs and Media centers: playon(last octet of the IP)
Servers:gimme(service thats hosted)

I recently switched to using the periodic table. I made myself a nice little spreadsheet to keep track of it all. I used to name hosts after random stuff like cereal, snacks, or just plain old [my first name]-desktop.

I've been doing birds. So far I just have Cardinal, Bluebird, and Sparrow

I always come up with a naming scheme and then immediately forget it either because I'm in a rush setting up a computer and forget to name the machine or because I get tired of trying to keep track of which machine is what.

I use the names of chemical elements, but with two twists: I assign them in the order in which they appear in the song "The Elements" by Tom Lehrer, and I use the German names. So I have (or had), among others, Wasserstoff, Sauerstoff, Stickstoff, etc ...

Star Trek ships at home. And Game of Thrones characters at work.

Lowercaps Dwarfplanets. chaos, orcus, ixion, ceres, haumea, makemake, etc. DHCP/router is named sol

On my labs cluster they are named after famous physicists

I usually name mine after songs that I happen to be listening to at the moment.

cakes then a different type of cake. ie cakesFlan

Bird species, most of the time. I look for a bird that seems to have some connection with the intended purpose of the box, then use that. e.g. my work computer's hostname is cormorant.

I give them weird syntax names so if someone was to hack in the names wouldn't give away what they are immediately. I don't reuse numbers so that if I rebuild something it gets a new num.

Location-Ordinal-NetworkNum-Counter Eg AU-01-01-01

Containers are just their application name except where I have more than 1 then its Application01,02,etc.

My Raspberry Pi's are named after planets and large bodies on the Solar system.

My servers are named after The Expanse characters and ships.

VM's and CT's after their usage with a tag in Proxmox for the OS used.

Scientists/inventors for me - bonus points if I can find one related to the machine's purpose (Kodi machine named after a contributor to the TV for example)

US states. If I have more than 50 different host names to manage, I should re-evaluate my hobbies. And then lazily move on to US state capitals.

All of my personal machines are Autobots.

At work we use space probes (Voyager, Pioneer, New Horizons, etc). We're a small satellite communications company.

I name mine after fictional planets.

Greek gods.

Zeus, ares, hera, dionysus, etc etc

Royal-Cat-(Computer type)

for example, Royal-Cat-PC or Royal-Cat-iPhone

I've changed my naming scheme so many times that its practically a set-of-sets at this point. But, "board games" is a good long one if you have a lot of machines.

After starting with X-Men characters and quickly running out I moved to Star Wars planets as there are a lot more of them

I do robots from video games, movies, TV shows, etc.

I tried thematic names but I kept adding devices until it all fell apart.

Now I'm using generic nouns like: plaza, highway, bazaar, stadium, minefield, church...

Different Japanese food from this list, cause they are delicious.

2nd ww navy vessels (inspired by kancolle)

personal machines - destroyers
servers - battleships

pi

pi3

pi3v2

space

fusion

magnet

qdivision

Meta machines on my system offer data. Infra machines on my system run the network (infrastructure). But my favourite is naming all my HDD’s platters; Media Platters, Service Platters, etc.

I’ve used Star Trek names before, but in general I’ve just started naming them what they’re used for (ex. Dev-Mint, StorageCore)

i use all the naming schemes. douglas adams, astronomy, greek letters, star trek ...

have to come up with a new concept every other machine.