from Hacker News

Choosing a Name for Your Computer

by davidjytang on 5/14/25, 10:32 AM with 18 comments

  • by dpoloncsak on 5/14/25, 5:33 PM

    Every machine in my home stack is named after a Pokemon. Theres hundreds of options, each pretty unique, and fun. You also get some sense of scale, in that stronger machines can correlate to stronger pokes.

    Beefy desktop with a strong GPU? Name it after a legendary.

    RPI? One of the thousand little electric guys. Rotom, voltorb, .....

    That daily driver laptop that never leaves your side? I usually pick a starter evo or eeveeloution

    Cloud server? Pick a flying type.

    It like having a theme to my whole infrastructure. Even my DuckDDNS is named after porygon, the cyber duck.

  • by GuinansEyebrows on 5/14/25, 3:15 PM

    my first tech job was doing datacenter monkeywork and phone support for a small-town ISP. a lot of our older machines predated the "function-number" naming scheme (db01.foobar.net, web03.foobar.net etc) and instead were named after various Middle Earth locales. edge routers took regional names, firewalls usually took mountain names, web/file servers were named after big structures/cities etc. took me forever to learn (since i'd only read the books once at that point) but i've carried it with me for personal machine/local network naming ever since.

    i like descriptive cattle names for machines i support professionally but home stuff gets to stay fun :)

  • by tears-in-rain on 5/14/25, 5:21 PM

    > Don't use antagonistic or otherwise embarrassing names.

             Words like "moron" or "twit" are good names if no one else is
         going to see them.  But if you ever give someone a demo on your
         machine, you may find that they are distracted by seeing a
         nasty word on your screen.  (Maybe their spouse called them
         that this morning.)  Why bother taking the chance that they
         will be turned off by something completely irrelevant to your
         demo.
    This.. Now i have bunch of meme-bros instead of useful colleagues.

  • by theandrewbailey on 5/14/25, 11:24 AM

    I've been using LoadingReadyRun's Installation Anxiety sketch[0] as a guide to name computers around my house. I originally had a file server, so I named it toilet, then I had a web server named gram, and named my router dishwasher. I recently started a job where I get to run iventoy[1], so the computer it's running on is paul.

    [0] https://wiki.loadingreadyrun.com/index.php/Installation_Anxi...

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ajW2fDy41fY

    [1] https://www.iventoy.com/

  • by Tanoc on 5/14/25, 3:45 PM

    The way I've been naming computers for about a decade now is formfactor, intent, and architecture. So you end up with SBC-MUSIC-ARM, TOWER-SERVER-INTEL, LAPTOP-TEMP-AMD, and so on and so forth. It's great so long as you don't have more than about fifteen computers. For a while there were three desktops in one room all dedicated to rendering, so they received names that when read in order were a nod towards a certain film: 1TOWER-RED, 2TOWER-ON, and 3TOWER-YOU.

  • by dehugger on 5/16/25, 5:19 AM

    I use Star Wars planets for computer. Screen time of the planet roughly correlates to the importance of the computer. Home server is Tatooine, Linux laptop is Hoth, gaming desktop is Mustafar, etc.

  • by euroderf on 5/14/25, 6:18 PM

    No mention of Japanese movie monsters? For shame. Ignoring a long and honorable tradition.

  • by osullish on 5/14/25, 9:57 PM

    My daily driver is called Unicorse - my favourite character from Bluey

  • by blahblah42 on 5/14/25, 6:46 PM

    My laptop is named after Rocinante, Don Quixote's horse.

  • by master_crab on 5/14/25, 11:06 PM

    I use Civil War generals.

    But only the Union side.