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.
Now let your pants down and tell me all about
your embarrassing host names!
I use the names of greek deities for my host names, mostly geared towards the function of the server/computer.
- Nyx (dark-blue laptop)
- Hypnos (gaming machine)
- Argus (pi-hole and reverse proxy)
- Prometheus (minecraft server)
My two wifi bands have always been Castor and Pollux.
The printer’s name is Marvin, from HHGTTG.
It never wants to work and always complains.
Server (big iron): Bender
Desktop (main character): Fry
Laptop (for accounting): Hermes
Netbook (small and dumb): Nibbler
Phone (held to my head): BrainSlug
HTPC (one big viewport): Leela
This is my scheme as well! Pretty much to the t. Except my HTPC is hypnotoad and nibbler is my NAS.
OMG Hypnotoad HTPC is so much better! Why didn’t I thnnk of that?
I take a word that’s related to the purpose of the new host and put it in an online translator and cycle through languages until I get something cool.
What names has this process come up with?
I’ve always done characters from Beatles songs
- Walrus
- Martha
- Her-Majesty
- Submarine
- MissLizzy
- Blackbird
- NowhereMan
- SgtPepper
- Jojo
I originally named all my hardware after members of the Wu-Tang Clan plus some close affiliates, but I actually ran out of names, so now I use MFDOOM aliases for my workstations, and keep Wu-Tang for infrastructure, because it’s for the children.
My home network is called The IT Clowd with these devices:
- Moss - physical server
- Roy - physical server
- Jen - vm - main docker host
- Richmond - vm - *arr stack
- Denholm - vm - management, monitoring
- Douglas - vm - Home Assistant stack
- Basement - vm - development server
Lol your arr stack.
"Jen what did you do?! I told you never open that door!"
For my ProxMox server stuff I went with Lord of the Rings. The idea being the servers would be locations and the VMs would characters.
So right now my main server is Rivendell, and my PiHole on it is Gandalf (“You shall not pass!” Heehee eventually he’ll have OPNSense too…)
If I get HomeAssistant at some point, obviously that’ll be Samwise!
My Klipper VM for 3D printing is Celebrimbor, and the individual printers are named after various deities or myth figures of crafting/smithing/creativity like Brigid and Eitri.
For my client devices, I name my personal hardware after BattleTech mechs and that works well. It’s intuitive because I can line up various roles and weight classes.
So my main desktop is Timberwolf, and my laptops are named after light mechs like Kitfox or Mistlynx.
Phones and tablets I don’t really care about, they usually just name themselves after their model anyway. :)
- Knowledge - Desktop
- Enlighten - Laptop
- Insanity - Server
- Madness - Router
Gotta say, from what I’ve heard from the trenches, “insanity” and “madness” sound like fantastic names for printers or print servers, but the router also makes perfect sense! Lol
Every computer I own is an autobot. My primary machine is always Optimus Prime, has been since 2008. Other machines get other names generally slightly inspired by their role / nature. Bumblebee and CliffJumper are miniPCs of various persuasions, Preceptor is my “mess around with AI” box, my big server that handles most of my data and network services is Wheeljack, my Macbook is Mirage, my backup server is Powerglide, my TV (which is an old Dell all in One running Linux Mint) is UltraMagnus.
my local hostnames are all David Bowie related. I have: outside (my laptop) blackstar (server 1) starman (server 2) heros (desktop1)
Asterix & Obelix themed.
- Asterix is a rpi4, strong and small with ssd running dockers with homeassistant, revproxy and webserver, and camera storage.
- Idefix is a rpi3, mainly test only nowadays.
- Obelix is my desktop running voidlinux.
I used to have Pneumatix which is the mailman as the mail server and Panoramix, the druid, as domoticz server, Heroix, chief, as firewall and Bellefleur, beauty, as webserver 😉 All were LXD virtual servers on a pentium 3. I try to find a character matching the functionality. Except for domoticz all are now dockers on Asterix, so less use of funny names.
Non linux machines would be roman names from Asterix & Obelix, but I have none …
At work we used famous dogs. Laika, Pluto, Cerberus etc
Rock types and Greek gods. Everything from emerald to Aphrodite.
I just memorise the IPs lmao. then again I only have 1 or 2 hosts up on my network ever
I name my devices after greek gods based on what I’m going in life at the time or after what their purpose is.
I named my first gaming PC “Poseidon” when I was doing ship related work. Now it’s my server.
My gaming PC is “Asclepius”, the Greek god of healing. Built when I got into healthcare.
Hermes, god of messeges, is my lil pi that helps with routing (pihole, pivpn, nginx).
My HTPC is Dionysus, Greek god of wine and parties.
My thinkpad is Persephone cus it looks good but doesn’t do much. I might rename it.
The services that I run on these are just named “device-service” e.g. hermes-nginx
I do the same but Egyptian
fuck, this is way better than my current naming scheme of "customer-<devicepurpose>, I’m stealing it for my next setup.
