wouterverhelst ([info]wouterverhelst) wrote,
@ 2004-03-29 23:21:00
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Machine naming schemes

Lars Wirzenius blogged about computer naming schemes earlier today. I agree with him that naming schemes are a good thing; when I co-founded NixSys, we considered a wide range of possible naming schemes. Things we considered included:

  • Composers (Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, ...)
  • Animals (Elephant, Monkey, Horse, ...)
  • Opera characters (papageno, carmen, donjose, ...)
  • ... and many more, but I don't remember all of them, and seem to have lost the list

Eventually, we ended up not using a common naming scheme, though. We installed our laptops before the naming scheme was decided upon, and thoughtlessly picked the naming schemes we used at home, without changing it to something else again afterwards. In my case, that meant musical styles (I have "rock", "blues", "folk", "hiphop", "trance", and "quickstep"; the laptop is "worldmusic"), whereas in his case, it was "hermes" at first (the old and well-known greek gods naming scheme) and "loge" now (although I don't really know what his new naming scheme is all about).


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Machine naming schemes
(Anonymous)
2004-03-30 08:43 am UTC (link)
Choosing a Name for Your Computer (ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/fyi/fyi5.html)

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themes
(Anonymous)
2004-04-07 10:05 pm UTC (link)
I name my computers after Bible characters. I try to match the personality/purpose of the machine to the ancient meaning of the name. The first Linux machine I named was an ancient i386 laptop. I named it ben-oni, which means "son of my trouble." Then there's cephas (rock), asher (happiness), benjamin/ben (son of the right hand), dan (he that judges), ephraim/eph (increasing), gad (troop), issachar/izzy (recompense), joseph/joe (addition), judah (confession), manasseh/manny (he that is forgotten), naphtali/naph (that struggles or fights), reuben (the vision of the son), simeon (that is heard), zebulon/zeb/zebulun (habitation).

My work group generally follows the guidelines suggested in Don Libes' document (ftp://ftp.rfc-editor.org/in-notes/fyi/fyi5.html). We run our own 10*net so name collisions aren't an issue. We use themes to tell various classes of machines apart. My favorite idea is evil characters (only one per storyline): darkone, sauron, zuul, vader, khan. We honor ships that sank: monitor, titanic, lusitania, hood, bismarck, and sultana. (Remember the Sultana! (http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultana_(steamboat))). We have some machines named after tropical islands: hawaii, haiti, aruba, kokomo, curacao, trinidad, tobago, bahama, cuba, fiji, montego, jamaica. A little lame, IMO, is cars: barracuda, beetle, cadillac, jetta, lincoln, buick, chevy, golf. And my least favorite naming scheme -- the philistines who came up with this showing blatant disregard common sense -- is adverbs: either, only, maybe. (Adverbs! What kind of bozo names a machine after an adverb?!) That reminds me -- I haven't used this theme yet, but I'm fond of clown names: bozo, krusty, ronald, clarabell, joey, coco, frosty, pierrot, grock, happy, cooky, bumpsy, poodles, dmitri, boomboom, chuckles, blinko, pickles, bobo, pagliacci, punch, hambone, snowflake, antonet, footit, chocolat.

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persuaded to become a livejournal.com user
[info]tbc
2004-04-09 03:59 pm UTC (link)
I wrote the previous comment and credit it with pushing me over the edge to become a LiveJournal blogger.

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Chemical Elements
(Anonymous)
2004-04-29 09:00 am UTC (link)
I use chemical elements, Hydrogen,Helium,etc.. fun thing is you keep the periodic table fresh in your head and if you do it right you have an instant mapping between ip address (R.A.M number) and name:

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Re: Chemical Elements
[info]wouterverhelst
2004-04-29 09:05 am UTC (link)
That really is a cool one. I actually once considered using the dutch words for "one", "two", "three", and so on, but that'd be too confusing. and silly, too.

Your suggestion is, uh, a really cool idea.

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Craziest ...
(Anonymous)
2004-05-12 09:15 am UTC (link)
I did some consulting for an outfit whose naming scheme was all the mountains in Wales (in Welsh). Lwytmor is easy, but some of the machine names had something like 30 chars and were rather unintuitive to type...

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